i^ DISTINCTIVE 
IDEA^^ JESUS 

CHARLES CARROLL ALBERTSON 




Class b K 1 8.. 5 

Book ,n^5 

Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE DISTINCTIVE 
IDEAS OF JESUS 



Charles Carroll Albertson 

w 
Minister of the Lafayette Avenue 
Presbyterian Churchy Brooklyn, N,Y, 




Philadelphia 

The Westminster Press 

1914 






Copyright, 1914, 
Bv F. M. Braselmann 



JUL -7 I3M 

©Ci.A37658i 



^ -K) 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preview 9 

CHAPTER 

I. The Seeking God 23 

11. Man's Vast Value 37 

III. A New and Living Way to God 51 

IV. New Life from God 67 

V. An Efficient Motive 93 

VI. The Unbroken Continuity of Life 109 

VII. The Distinctive Personality of Jesus 125 

Bibliography . . ; 147 



PREVIEW 



HEATHENISM gave iis a seeking religion; Ju- 
daism a hoping religion, but Christianity is the 
realization of what heathenism sought and Judaism 
hoped for. — Luthaedt. 

A mere Plato, theorizing about life, a Seneca, full of 
moral apotheg-ms, Jesus never was, nor could be. He 
has wrought a revolution in the moral and intellectual 
life of mankind. patient Jesus, touching us with Thy 
strong, strange, quiet, loving strokes, calming our hearts, 
nerving and girding us for duty, no time or distance 
separates from Thee. We see Thee, hear Thee, feel Thee 
still ! — Chaeles McTyeire Bishop. 

But, irrespective of the miracle-working of Jesus, His 
power is altogether an unparalleled fact in history. A 
new era dates from His birth. His coming, as Doctor 
Sears has well said, was a new influx of power. Jesus 
seems to concentrate in His own person the great con- 
structive forces of religion. ... It was His wonderful 
work to create in the Roman Empire a new faith, a new 
hope and a new joy. The belief in immortality became 
through Him in Judea what it had never been in Athens 
or Rome, a li\dng, working faith, which transformed the 
earth and transfigured death. . . . 

The unexampled power of Jesus was creative, like- 
wise, of a new humanity. It poured its fresh, renewing 
streams through all the channels of social life. Modern 
society as well as modern history dates from the advent 
of Christ. ... It was the peculiar power of the de- 
spised Nazarine to call forth, by a mighty voice, a new 
civilization from the grave of the old. It may be said 
that philosophy rolled away the stone, but to restore life 
was the miracle wrought by Christianity. — ISTewman" 
Smith, Old Faiths in New Light, 2d ed., pp. 210, 211, 
215. 



PREVIEW 

CHEISTIANITY has in it much that is 
common to other faiths. The discov- 
ery of the common ground npon which we, 
as Christians, may meet Jews, Confucians, 
Buddhists and Mohammedans is a very 
essential part of the ministry of the modern 
missionary. Jesus did not repudiate the 
teachings of those who had preceded Him, 
save as He believed them to misrepresent the 
Father and to burden needlessly the sons of 
men. Nor did He ever intimate the worth- 
lessness of the doctrines of those who should 
come after Him. He fulfilled the truths of 
Judaism ; that is to say, He filled them full, 
made up what was lacking in them. So, 
Christianity is Judaism plus. It is Confu- 
cianism plus — ^plus very much. It is Bud- 
dhism plus. Whatever in these systems is 
grotesque or puerile, Christianity is minus 
that. And Christianity is plus by so much 
as it makes plain what they make vague, 

[9] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

makes sure wliat they leave in doubt, renders 
vital what they impose as merely mechanical 
or imitative, or what they leave powerless 
and dead. 

Christianity is not unique in holding a doc- 
trine of sin. That man needs to be rescued 
from error in thought and practice is one of 
the postulates of every great faith. Chris- 
tianity is not peculiar in that it teaches a doc- 
trine of salvation. Every other religion has 
its corresponding word. Christianity is not 
alone in its teaching of a future existence. 
That idea is also present in some form in 
other religions. There is a Christian code of 
morality, but Christianity differs from other 
faiths more in its dynamics than in its ethics. 
That missionary was both truthful and wise 
who said to a Confucian, ^^You need the 
power of Christ to enable you to obey Con- 
fucius.'' 

Count Olmma, one of Japan^s Eeenest 
statesmen, declared in an address at the 
celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 
founding of Christian missions in Japan: 

[10] 



PREVIEW 



^^The sages of Japan and China have taught 
many excellent truths in regard to morality, 
but they have too much neglected the spirit- 
ual ; and no nation which neglects the spirit- 
ual can permanently prosper. Modern 
civilization has its rise in the teachings of 
the Sage of Judea, in Whom alone is found 
the dynamic of moral progress/' 

But there are other ideas which are the 
distinctive fruit of the Christian Gospel. 
They exist, if at all in other systems, indefi- 
nitely. If other faiths contain them, they are 
in solution. In Christianity they are defined, 
precipitated. They are the radical elements 
of our faith — radical in the sense that they 
are at the root of the system. They are char- 
acteristically Christian ; that is, Christianity 
has the qualities it has because of these doc- 
trines. Without these it could not be what 
it is. 

In at least six great points Christianity is 
distinctive. In an age when indifference some- 
times calls itself liberality — and when in- 
valid thinking is often mistaken for tolerance, 

[11] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

it is easy to fall into an attitude that views 
Christianity as merely one of ^Hhe world's 
great altar stairs that slope through dark- 
ness up to God'''; an attitude from which Je- 
sus appears simply one among humanity ''s 
saviours, a sort of superior Socrates, and not 
greatly to be preferred to Zoroaster. 

The study of comparative religions is vastly 
enlightening. A fair knowledge of all the re- 
ligious systems which have obtained among 
the nations enables the student to set aside 
for a season everything common to Christi- 
anity and other faiths. After he has done this, 
there will be a Christian residuum, a group 
of ideas belonging peculiarly to that religion 
which is based upon the person, words and 
works of Jesus. It is not claimed that there 
are no traces of these in other systems, but 
that, in Christianity, they are not merely 
contained but developed. They are among 
the essentials, and not the incidentals. They 
are not merely ornamental, but funda- 
mental. 

First among these ideas is that of God seek- 

[12] 



PREVIEW 



ing the lost. The second has to do with the 
value of that which is lost. The third pre- 
sents a method by which the lost may be re- 
stored. The fourth offers a new quality of 
spiritual life to the returned prodigal. The 
fifth furnishes the lost, who has been restored 
and reborn, with a motive by which he may 
prove himself worthy the utmost effort of 
God to save him. The sixth surveys the life 
of man, lost in sin, restored, reborn and re- 
furnished with moral power, fitted for im- 
mortal fellowship with God. These, then, are 
the distinctive doctrines of Christianity — 
God's Solicitous Fatherhood, Humanity's 
Eternal Value, Jesus Christ ^s Mediatorial 
Ministry, the New Birth of Manhood, Love 
as the Law of the New Man, and the Unbroken 
Continuity of Life, 

That these ideas are set forth in the New 
Testament as in no other sacred book needs 
no argument, and proof cannot fairly be de- 
manded. That each of them in itself is of 
incalculable value to the race, it is needless 
to affirm; But that all of them are the ideas 

[13] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

of Jesus, that He plainly stated and often re- 
peated them in various terms, is a fact of 
which we need to be reminded. 

These studies, popular rather than aca- 
demic though they are, may serve to point out 
that, whatever may have been added to the 
original content, of the Gospel by elaboration 
at the hands of those who* sought to interpret 
Jesus ^ message and meaning to the world, 
the ideas just named have not been superim- 
posed upon Jesus' teachings. They are a 
part of them, if indeed they do not form the 
very substance of them. The apostles hold 
them — Paul, John, Peter, James, the un- 
known author of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
— ^but they do not pretend to have originated 
them. They build upon these ideas, and con- 
fess that Another had already laid the foun- 
dation. And He had. If the Epistles had 
never been written, or if they had been lost 
amidst the ruins of that Eastern world to 
which they were first given, we would still be 
able to derive these distinctive ideas from 
the four Gospels. They are the bequest of 

[14] 



PREVIEW 



Jesus to the world, and what they have meant 
to the world is incalculable. 

Phillips Brooks in his Bohlen lectures on 
*^The Influence of Jesus/' and Doctor Eich- 
ard S. Storrs in his Ely lectures on ^^The 
Divine Origin of Christianity Indicated by Its 
Historical Effects," make plain in what de- 
gree humanity is indebted to Jesus for its 
loftiest inspirations. In Glover's ^^ Conflict 
of Eeligions in the Early Eoman Empire,'' 
the author reminds us that it was a new thing 
when religion, in the name of truth, and for 
the love of God, abolished the connection of 
the human mind with a trivial past; when 
Jesus cut away at once every vestige of the 
primitive and every savage survival — all 
natural growths perhaps, and helpful, too, to 
primitive man and to the savage, but con- 
fusing to men on a higher plane — set religion 
free from all taboos and rituals, and became 
the Vindicator and Exponent of eternal reali- 
ties. It is such a Man as this, he says, who 
liberates mankind. 

To what extent these ideals of Jesus have 

[15] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

molded or modified the thought of humanity, 
entered into the very -unconscious cerebra- 
tion of the modem man, may be imagined if 
not measured when we reflect how largely 
our lives have been enriched by such ideas 
as liberty, philanthropy, democracy and im- 
mortality. 

It is no great step from the apprehension 
of the seeking God to the impulse which leads 
one who has been found — and who, in Jesus, 
finds himself — to seek his still wandering fel- 
low man. It inevitably follows, when the 
man is supplied with an efficient motive. In 
the recognition of the supreme worth of man, 
the indefeasible dignity of the soul, lies the 
most fertile source of social uplift. That the 
basis of morality is buttressed by faith in the 
superiority of the individual to death is 
hardly to be doubted. 

The author does not undertake to discuss 
the influence of the distinctive ideas of Jesus. 
He merely suggests that our interest in these 
ideas is much more than theological. Many a 
movement called modem has its roots in an- 

[16] 



PREVIEW 



cient soil, and it were well for us not to lose 
sight of the Sower who scattered with lavish 
hand in Judea the seeds of an age-long and 
world-wide harvest^ — a harvest the world is 
only just beginning to reap. 



[17] 



I 

THE SEEKING GOD 



PROPHETS, and even men of genius, can by their 
message bring iis near to God, but they cannot per- 
manently keep us there, or cure that rebound and rever- 
sion in which our souls gravitate to earth and cleave to 
the dust. Nothing can, until we are quickened by that 
unique, living and eternal Word wherein God comes near 
to us in very presence and act, and not in message alone. 
He comes near and makes us His own. Others can im- 
press us with God; in Christ God creates us anew. 
Others by their very purity may make us doubt whether 
we have any right to approach a holy God ; but in Christ 
such misgivings are submerged in the discovery that He 
has taken the matter out of our hands into His own, and 
Himself has come to us and made us His forever. . . . 
God did not send, but came. — P. T. Forsyth, The Per^ 
son <md Place of Jesus Christ, pp. 57, 58. 



THE SEEKING GOD 

FROM Genesis to Eevelation the Bible is 
full of God. It is preeminently God's 
book. Yet there is in it from first to last no 
attempt to prove that there is a God. The 
writers of the various documents which con- 
stitute the Bible never argue the question. 
They boldly assume that God is, and that He 
is a Person. The volume commences with 
the simple words, '^In the beginning God.'^ 
The author acts upon the supposition that 
what all religions admit needs no proof. 
Subsequent writers proceed to portray the 
character of God as exhibited in His dealings 
with nations and men. They represent Him 
as one, not many ; as spiritual, not material ; 
as just and wise and righteous. All of this 
concerns us as nothing else can. We are 
eager to know the nature of that Force which 
works in all things and is, as we believe, at 

[23] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

the heart of the universe- Force is, in itself, 
a cold and comfortless word. The Hebrew 
prophets say this Force is personal, holy, 
wise, benevolent — ^which is the best the He- 
brew prophets can do for us. But that is 
much. To understand how much it is, we have 
only to remember that pagan conceptions of 
God never approached the idea of benevolent 
kindness, much less of holiness. So the He- 
brew mind has made an incalculable contribu- 
tion to human knowledge. 

But the supreme revelation was yet to come. 
In the fullness of time, in the fullness of 
preparation, expectancy and need, Jesus came 
to make up what was lacking in our view of 
God. He had much to say about God — more 
than about any other subject. He called God 
a Father: ^^I ascend unto my Father, and 
your Father.^' 

There are fathers and fathers. Jesus pic- 
tures God as a compassionate Father. Such 
is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal. 
Not the son, but the father, is the central 
figure of that matchless picture. Then there 

[24] 



THE SEEKING GOD 



is the parable of the Lost Sheep. Not the 
sheep, but the shepherd, is the chief char- 
acter of that touching drama. Put these two 
parables into one, and we have God repre- 
sented not only as going out to meet the lost 
one, but going into the mountains of the far 
country and seeking him with anxious heart 
and aching arms. This is Jesus' idea of God. 
The last, the least, the lost, are ever Jesus ^ 
favorite words. ^^The last shall be first.'' 
^^ Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of 
the least of these my brethren.'' ^^The Son 
of man is come to seek and to save that which 
was lost.'' 

And Jesus gives us to understand that not 
only does the Father seek the lost, but that, 
in Himself, God, veiled in flesh, is seeking 
man. Thus, He is somewhat more than a rep- 
resentative, a messenger, of God — He is God, 
revealing in every step of His life, in every 
miracle of healing and in every parable of 
truth, the Father's mind and heart. So, Je- 
sus' coming was a part of God's seeking. 

In order to save the lost, the heart of the 

[25] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

Eternal must be wonderfully kind. And to 
make saints out of such unpromising material 
as human clay with all its faults and flaws, 
its incapacities and corruptions, challenges 
the powers of the Omnipotent. This is the 
purpose of the Gospel — to transform the sons 
of men, with all their defilement, into kings 
of an immovable kingdom and priests of an 
unending priesthood. 

The pearl-diver gropes in darkness and 
dangers unimaginable to bring the precious 
jewel up from ocean depths. The genius of 
a Washington converts a host of undisciplined 
troops into an effective army. A young ar- 
tist, before whose eyes a heavenly vision 
shone, constructs a cathedral window of rare 
beauty out of the discarded fragments left 
by other workmen. Invisible forces of the 
atmosphere take up the moisture from slimy 
ponds and sluggish streams and salty seas, 
and send it down again in pure and purify- 
ing dew and rain. Yet all of these are but 
imperfect symbols of what God undertakes 
to do when He saves the lost, and constructs 

[26] 



THE SEEKING GOD 



out of rescued material the august and in- 
vincible Kingdom of Heaven. Gods many 
there have been in earth's theologies and 
mythologies, but where, outside of the Holy 
Scriptures, shall we find such a God as this? 
No Persian, Hindu, Egyptian, Babylonian, 
Greek, Eoman or Norse deity has been 
thought of as a saviour of lost men. By no 
effort of reason can any one of them be iden- 
tified with the father of the prodigal, looking 
forth from his lonely dwelling place for the 
first sign of a travel-worn and penitent son. 

A field of cactus is one of the most forbid- 
ding sights on our arid southwestern plains. 
Fruitless and thorny, it cumbers the parched 
ground. One day, a man said, ^^If I could 
but infuse the cactus with the active and fer- 
tile principle of a fruit-bearing plant, I could 
make the desert a garden. '^^ He tried to do 
it. He tried, presumably, unnumbered times, 
and failed. At last he tried and did not fail. 
To-day, at Santa Eosa, Luther Burbank will 
show you a variety of cactus without thorns, 
but not without fruit. It is one of the mir- 

[27] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

acles of the modem world of scientific experi- 
mentation. What that man has done for the 
cactus is a symbol of what Jesns is doing for 
the human race. He came to live in our des- 
ert. The sharp stones bruised His feet, and 
the hot sun smote Him; wild beasts of the 
hills howled about Him, and wilder beasts of 
men hunted Him to his death ; but He did not 
give up His life until he had engrafted upon 
humanity the life of God. 

The prophet who had prevision of a time 
when the wilderness and the solitary place 
shall be glad, and when the desert shall re- 
joice and blossom as the rose, may not have 
had a clear conception of the means by which 
that transformation shall be effected, but we 
are not without evidence that he thought of 
a divine Man as the creator of new conditions. 
^^The parched ground shall become a pool.^^ 
^^The parched ground '^ is literally ^Hhe mi- 
rage." So Isaiah dreamed of a day when the 
ideal shall be realized, when that which all 
the holy have hoped for shall become a fact. 
Henceforth let us not call Jesus the divine 

[28] 



THE SEEKING GOD 



Dreamer — He is more than that, more than 
an interpreter of dreams — He is the worker- 
out of dreams, at once the fulfillment and 
fulfiUer of them. 

Yet the fulfillment of man^s fairest dream 
was the fruit of no mere languid aspiration. 
The architect dreams of a bridge across a 
chasm, but the laborers are yet to come. Je- 
sus is man^s vicarious Bridge-builder. 

The parable of the Lost Coin indicates 
God's desire for the restoration of man. So 
also does that of the Lost Sheep. But that of 
the Lost Son completes the picture of God 
and adds to our knowledge of man the idea of 
his possible cooperation with God in his own 
salvation. A coin is valuable, but insensate. 
It cannot know whether it is in the possession 
of its rightful owner. A sheep can know its 
own lostness, but is helpless. It is a silly 
creature, easily panic-stricken, and totally de- 
void of the homing instinct, common to dogs 
and doves, and possessed even by bees. It 
can cooperate with its rescuer only as its pa- 
thetic voice may lead him to the pit into which 

[29] 



-^,*^ 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

it has fallen, or to the rock on which it lies 
bleeding. But a wandering human soul can 
say, ^^I will arise and go to my Father.'^ He 
can hear the Father's voice, and answer, '^I 
am here, and I am coming.'' It is not too 
much to say that God listens for that answer- 
ing cry. He hearkens, that is, He bends for- 
ward to hear man's answer to His ^^Come." 
The life of Jesus from Bethlehem to Olivet 
is God's invitation to man to think of Him 
as a Father. Everything He is and says and 
does beckons us Godward. Nothing forbids. 
."When our reluctant souls yield to the gentle 
yet urgent entreaty of the Christ, it dawns 
upon us in how many ways and by how many 
means He has been appealing to us to come 
to God. His voice may long have fallen upon 
deaf ears, but when we hear it we recall its 
accents unheeded in the past — in our past. 
Had we listened, we had heard that Voice in 
the soft winds, in the loud storms, in the quiet 
of the evening, in the silences of ttKe night. 
By our need of fellowship, by our unquenched 
desire for satisfying truth, by our sense of 

[30] 



THE SEEKING GOD 



the vanity of life 's best and of the bitterness 
of life's worst, by onr yearning for rest in 
the sheltering shadow of the Eternal, He calls 
US, and the degree of onr response to Jesus' 
call is the measure of our approach to God. 



[31] 



n 

MAN'S VAST VALUE 



ORTHODOXIES will replace orthodoxies, but evan- 
gelicalism, as a loyalty of the spiritual life to 
Jesus Christ, will abide. Modern men will succeed mod- 
ern men, but He, the Christ, will continue to evoke the 
faith and adoring love of countless generations. Phys- 
ical life will end, but the life of the spirit will abide 
with its Lord, who is Spirit. Social orders will replace 
social orders, but brotherhood will expand increasingly 
until the Great Day when Jesus shall be supreme, and 
the successive approaches of the spiritual life toward 
Him as its Type and Saviour shall have culminated in a 
social order in which sin shall be crushed, Christlike 
souls shall constitute the Democracy of New Spirit, and 
God shall be all in all. — Shailer Mathews, The Gospel 
and the Modern Man, p. 327. 



II 

MAN'S VAST VALUE 

THEEE has come into the world a new 
sense of the worth of man since Jesns of 
Nazareth lived and wrought and taught. It 
is most remarkable that He who knew man 
most deeply, thought most highly of him. 
That is a fine definition of a friend — one who 
knows all about us and still believes in us. 
Jesus is man's best Friend. 

Three thousand years ago, pyramids could 
be built without enormous cost, even though 
to r'aise one granite pile required the labor of 
a hundxed thousand men for thirty years. 
Whai Were a hundred thousand human 
lives in the eyes of a Pharaoh, a Eameses, a 
P.tolemy? What were they in the view of a 
Caesar?! It detracts somewhat from the glory 
of the colossal monuments of the ancient 
world to recall that they were possible only 
because human life was incredibly cheap. 

[37] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

The great wars of tlie past were possible 
because there was no Carlyle to rise up and 
cry: ^^Why this waste of life? Is not every 
soldier son of some mother? Why should 
motherhood rear sons for slaughter?'^ Was 
Carlyle a voice, or the echo of a voice f Where 
did he get his estimate of the value of a man's 
life? Let this story answer that question. 
Two men were walking together along a 
pleasant road in Scotland. They came to a 
hill overlooking a peaceful valley. In the 
distance was a village with a solitary church 
spire rising above its thatched roofs. One 
of the men pointed to the church, and said, 
^^Were it not for that, you and I could not be 
here.'^ He meant that civilization is under 
obligation to Christianity for all it counts 
most dear. The speaker was Carlyle. His 
voice was an echo out of Galilee. 

You may see along the Tiber engraved 
markers in the walls of palaces, indicating 
the high-water mark of the river at flood 
time. When an old Eoman dramatist said, 
*^I am a man and nothing human is alien to 

[38] 



MAN'S VAST VALUE 



me/' the high-water mark of paganism was 
reached. It required a lofty exercise of 
spirit to reach that height. For, remember, 
so great a mind, so ample a soul, to use his 
own phrase, as Plato, had declared: ^^A me- 
chanic has no leisure to be under a physician's 
treatment; let him try some active remedy 
and keep about his business. If he recovers 
he can keep on with his work; if he dies he 
is rid of his troubles. If he cannot attend 
to his work it is useless for him to live.'' 
And it was x^ristotle whb declared : ^^ We can- 
not dispense with farmers and mechanics, 
but these have nothing to do with public af- 
fairs, and are not worthy of the name citi- 
zen. They are incapable of greatness of soul 
because they work for wages, and therefore 
must be of a mercenary spirit. The differ- 
ence between them and slaves is an external 
difference only. They ought to be slaves, 
and would be if the state were rich enough 
to buy them, or strong enough to enslave 
them. Therefore our free youth ought not 
to learn any trade, for that would degrade 

[39] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

them from citizens to meclianics/' Cicero 
expresses tlie same opinion: ^^What more 
foolish than to respect the mass of the peo- 
ple as anything, when you despise them in- 
dividually as laborers and barbarians!^' 

Into a world accustomed to such sentiments 
as these, Jesus came with a totally different 
conception of the worth of man, teaching that 
every man is great just because he is a man. 
When that idea took root in human thought, 
it had within it the promise of all coming 
freedom. 

If any man asks, ^^When and where did 
Jesus teach any such doctrine T' we point to 
the whole tendency of His teachings, to His 
conduct in social relations, as well as to His 
words. See His absolute disregard of tribal, 
national and social distinctions. The Jew in 
Jerusalem and the Samaritan under the 
shadow of Ebal; the Greek from Decapolis 
and the Syrophoenician woman, were equally 
in His sight potential subjects of the King- 
dom of God. The hated publican He did not 
despise. The blind beggar, the naked de- 

[40] 



MAN'S VAST VALUE 



moniac with foam on his cut lips, the unclean 
leper, the forgotten social pariah — all these 
He treated with tender regard for their hu- 
manity. He had eyes wherewith to pierce 
th^ thin disguise of flesh and see beneath 
however repulsive exterior the image of God. 

Consider His estimate of the worth of man 
— any man — all men — as judged by His ap- 
peal to their intellect. The noblest teachers 
the world has known appealed to select 
classes, considering only the brilliant, the 
clever, the enlightened, as worthy or capable 
of receiving their truth. Moses had no mes- 
sage for the heathen — and all non-Hebrew 
nations were heathen to him. Plato had no 
message for the barbarian — and all non-Hel- 
lenic races were barbarians. Buddhism has 
its esoteric revelation — ^its truth for the ini- 
tiate alone. But to whom did Jesus appeal? 
To all men. He knew no aliens. The only 
man barred out of His Kingdom is the man 
who erects his own barriers. 

Not long after Jesus disappears from sight 
we see Saul of Tarsus, narrowest of the nar- 

[41] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

row, elect of the elect, break away from all 
tradition, all custom, all precedent, and 
preacli this Gospel to Jew and Greek, bond 
and free, male and female. Eoman cen- 
turion, Philippian woman and Greek slave 
girl are all welcome to hear the new evangel. 
Doubt if we may the miracle of the noonday 
radianci^ that smote Saul blind, we cannot 
doubt that something had transformed him 
from the bigoted devotee of a provincial 
faith into the zealous apostle of the most 
catholic and democratic doctrine of man the 
world had yet known. The appeal of Saul — 
now Paul — ^like that of his Master, was to the 
intellect of man as man. 

If Jesus ^ recognition of the intellect of 
man implies, as it does, man's vast value, 
even more does His appeal to man's deeper 
moral nature. It was true once that not 
many rich, not many mighty, not many noble, 
were called, but from the first all who were 
called were called to moral wealth and worth, 
soul power, and nobility of spirit. In the 
name of a religion which professes lofty 

[42] 



MAN'S VAST VALUE 



sentiments, India has been cursed with a 
caste system which is the chief obstacle to so- 
cial progress and reform. According to Hin- 
duism, one bom a hewer of wood or a drawer 
of water can never in this world be anything 
better. Born of the thief caste, he can never 
in this world rise above it. But when Chris- 
tianity confronts caste there is a battle to the 
death. Either caste goes down, or Christian- 
ity is defeated in the encounter. The religion 
of Jesus everywhere proclaims that there is 
no degree of mastery in the practice of vir- 
tue, no depth of knowledge of the will of God, 
no height of holiness, no expertness in the 
interpretation of spiritual mysteries, that 
any man of any birth or social stratum may 
not aspire to and attain. The serf may be a ^ 
saint. The mechanic may be a priest unto men ' 
and a prince unto God. The humble shall hear 
and be glad* We all, beholding, are changed. 

''The humblest life that lives may be divine; 
Christ changed the common water into wine. 
Starlike comes Love from out the magic East — 
And Life, the hermit, finds his fast a feast.'' 

[43] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

Under the tuition of such a faith, a faith 
that afl&rms the value of man as a child of 
God, a faith that appeals to the intellect and 
moral nature of all men — regardless of arbi- 
trary distinctions — a faith that offers glory, 
honor and immortality to all who will to do 
the will of Jesus, men soon outgrew the im- 
l perfect opinions of the philosophers as to the 
value of man. So Basil declares, ^^Man is 
a great being." Ambrose exclaims, ^'Thou, 
man, art the great work of God." Chrysos- 
tom says: ^'Do not imagine that an injury 
to a slave will be pardoned as of no conse- 
quence. Human law recognizes a difference 
between the two classes, but God^s law knows 
none." And again, the golden-mouthed 
speaks: ^^You say your father is a consul. 
No matter — show me your life; by this I 
will judge of your nobility. I call the slave- 
noble if I see nobility in his life. I call base 
and ignoble, him who, though in the midst of 
dignities, has a servile spirit." 

Basil, Ambrose and Chrysostom were 
among the early preachers of the new system, 

[44] 



MAN'S VAST VALUE 



Did emperors see in such an idea the future 
overthrow of CaBsarism, imperialism, insti- 
tutionalisml It was there! There the 
Florentine Republic, the Dutch Eepublic, the 
English Commonwealth and the American 
Constitution are contained. There were the 
germs of a movement which has been slow 
to mature, but which has made a new political 
map of the world. The uplift of the masses f 
is the outgrowth of that idea. From it has^ 
been derived the present passion for the cure 
of social and industrial ills. Jesus' doctrine 
of man's vast value is behind the philan- 
thropy which writes over against the natural 
law of the survival of the fittest the new law, 
^^We must make the unfit fit to survive !'^ If 
the natural law of the survival of the fittest 
means the survival of the fittest to survive, 
and not the survival of the fittest to live, then 
how immeasurably superior is Christ's doc- 
trine, which seeks to make the morally unfit 
fit to live, fit to fill life with hitherto unim- 
agined fullness, fit to invest the word ^^life" 
— ^which may mean mere animated existence 

[45] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

— ^with meaning that exhausts the power of 
language to define! Henry Herbert Knibbs 
gives "US such an idea of life endowed with 
the quality of eternity: 

Heaven is viewless. That is good for us. 

Hell is apparent in the daily stress, 

And nightly strife with dragons. That^s good, too. 

He that once sees the pit avoids the pit, 

And on the path of safety nears the throne. 

The soul but turns upon itself that spends 

All effort in avoiding sin, nor nears 

The portals of the Home. Aye, He asks more — 

A ceaseless toiling toward the waiting Face, 

To win the blessed best there is in Life. 



[46] 



Ill 

A NEW AND LIVING WAY TO GOD 



THE eonseience-stirring*, faith-evoking Jesus of Naz- 
areth, who, amidst the flux of words in which men 
have tried to explain His person, has, through the cen- 
turies, satisfied man's hunger for a knowable, reconciled 
God, given the perfect revelation of the spiritual life that 
is eternal, and proclaimed the certainty of the life to 
come, is an unchanging element of a Christianity that 
ever seeks to adapt the Gospel to a changing order. 

If the modern man cannot understand or accept an 
inherited Christology, he can at least in the depths of 
his own spiritual life serve the real Person whose re- 
demptive energy doctrine seeks to estimate and enforce. 
And in serving Him he will know the power as well as 
the struggle of the emancipated, victorious, spiritual 
life. — Shailer Mathews, The Gospel and the Modem 
Man, p. 298. 



Ill 

'A NEW AND LIVING WAY TO GOD 

AT the very basis of all the great religions 
L lies the hypothesis — possibly it would 
better be called hypostasis — ^that man needs 
to be restored ; that, made to be at home with 
God, he has somehow lost himself; that, away 
from God, man is out of normal adjustment. 
It goes far to establish the doctrine of sin 
that it is a part of every religious system 
that has taken any deep hold upon the human 
intellect. 

The literature of the world affords ample 
illustration of the experience of conscious 
moral lostness. Poetry, the history of the 
heart, is full of it. Pagan moralists confess 
it. The old, old cry has echo in modem 
hearts, 

"I was bom in ignorance, 
I have lived in uncertainty, 
I die in trepidation — Cause of Causes, pity me !" 

[51] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

Chief among the problems of social sci- 
ence is that of correcting, arresting, or cur- 
ing the deep-seated tendencies in man to evil. 
By all the complicated codes of law, civil and 
criminal; by all the machinery of govern- 
ment designed to protect our persons and 
guard our properties from harm ; by all our 
institutions for retributive and remedial 
treatment of wrongdoers, we confess a com- 
mon alienation from the ideal and estrange- 
ment from goodness, a world need, which can 
be satisfied only by a world return to God. 

The end of all religion is to bridge the 
chasm between man and God ; to bring man 
back to God — or up to God; to diminish the 
distance between what humanity now is and 
humanity as God sees it in His finished 
thought. The very word religion means just 
this, to reunite, to rebind in perfect harmony 
the finite and the infinite. 

When Jonathan Edwards said, ^^I will 
make the salvation of my soul the great busi- 
ness of my life,'' he spoke wisely, and, con- 
sidered as to its ultimate implication, un- 

[52] 



A NEW AND LIVING WAY 

selfishly. No foolish man, no selfish man, 
ever made true religion the serious business 
of his life. Browning represents Johannes 
Agricola as saying: 

^^There's heaven above, and night by night 
I look right through its gorgeous roof, 
Nor suns and moons, tho' e^er so bright 
Avail to stop me; splendor-proof, 
I keep the broods of stars aloof. 
For I intend to get to God.'' 

This, after all, is the quest of the ages — 
not for gold, but for God. Philip's words to 
Jesus were representative, and' not alone 
personal, ^^Show us the Father/^ But we 
expect no vision of the Eternal. All Philip 
wanted was — and all we want is — to know 
how to get to Grod. Jesus knew what all the 
sons of men were seeking, and He sai\i, '^I 
am the way."^ If He had said, ^^I know the 
way,^' it had been a startling thing. If 
He had said, ^^I will show you tke way,^^ He 
had promised an incalculably precious gift 
to men. But when He said, ^^I am the way,'' 
He left the company of mere students and 

[53] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

teachers, and stepped into a radiance that 
gives deathless glory to His name. There 
have been other pathfinders, but here is One 
who claims to be the Path, Is it strange the 
anonymous author of the Epistle to the He- 
brews calls Him the ^^new and living way/' to 
God? 

/' The old way was formal, ceremonial. Mo- 
ses said, ^^ Sacrifice is the way to God.^^ So 
altars were sprinkled with the blood of the 
lambs and calves. This was symbol, but as 
with ns, the symbol was too often mistaken 
for that it was intended to symbolize, and 
worship degenerated into a hollow, spiritless 
form. Prophets and psalmists called the peo- 
ple back to truth, saying, ^^The sacrifices of 
God are a broken spirit.'^ ^^Eend your heart, 
and not your garments." Yet all the words 
of preachers and prophets fell on deaf ears, 
until Jesus came to demonstrate the mean- 
ing of a living sacrifice; to translate into 
human experience the divine will with refer- 
ence to man^s life and man^s approach to God. 
There is now no need for beasts to bleed upon 

[54] 



A NEW AND LIVING WAY 

the altar. Let the cooing doves and the low- 
ing kine be driven from the temple courts. Let 
fires die out, which once consumed the flesh 
of pious offerings. The sacrificial life and 
death of Jesus Christ fulfills all types, and 
the way of His Cross and ours is the new and 
living way to God. 

The late Dr. John Fiske gave us a book 
entitled ^'Through Nature to God." Thomas 
Moore wrote : 

There's nothing bright, above, below, 
From flowers that bloom to stars that glow, 
But in its impress we can see 
Some feature of the Deity. 

The pantheist points us to God in nature. 
The devout naturalist looks through nature 
up to nature ^s God. He who sincerely seeks 
God in forest or field is not without his re- 
ward. The astronomer who cried, ^^0 God, 
I think thy thoughts after thee!'^ had caught 
a glimpse of nature's God. To him the star- 
paved spaces of the sky were paths by which 
his mind was led to God. 

To every reverent student of natural 

[55] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

forces, the laws of nature are the thoughts 
of God. AYlien we discover some great prin- 
ciple, such as gravitation or evolution, we 
perceive God's habits in* the creation and 
government of the universe. But, though na- 
ture is not a dead realm ; though there is life 
in all its parts, and though that life is one, 
whether blowing underfoot in clover, or 
beating overhead in stars, the way to God 
through nature is not an easy way. The pil- 
grim is all too likely to grow weary of the 
quest, and to fix his faith upon some work of 
God. Fire-worshipers, sun-worshipers, idol- 
worshipers of every sort, have stopped short 
of the Ultimate Cause of causes. Left to 
himself, the common man never finds his way 
through nature to God. He mistakes nature 
for God, prays to the wind, and peoples the 
air with spirits, of his own imagining. Na- 
ture needs an interpreter. 

How dull and unattractive to the most of 
us is any nature study until some skillful 
teacher opens our understanding! One of 
his students pays this tribute to Professor 

[56] 



A NEW AND LIVING WAY 

Agassiz: ^^His teaching was a revelation; 
nothing of natural history could ever be the 
same to us after he had spoken to us of it." 
Many a student of philosophy has said the 
same of Mark Hopkins or of James McCosh. 
The way into the meaning of truth is best 
opened by a living teacher. The word^ — ^bio- 
logical, astronomical, philosophical — must be 
made flesh and dwell among us. The Word 
of God must be made flesh. It must be em- 
bodied in a human life. Jesus Christ is that 
Embodiment. The other word for embodi- 
ment is Incarnation. 

As supplemental, in a sense, to Dr. Fiske's 
*^ Through Nature to God," Dr. George A. 
Gordon gives us his study, ^^ Through Man 
to God. " It is a helpful and noble book, and 
points to the same necessity in the realm of 
religion that exists in the realm of science 
and art — the truth must be embodied that we 
may all see and know it. It must have been 
the consideration of this necessity on our 
part, as well as of infinite goodness on God's 
part, which led Professor Eomanes to write 

[57] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

in his fragmentary ^^ Thoughts on Eeligion/' 
^'The Incarnation is not only not unreason- 
able, but antecedently probable." 

The fatherliness of God is a sufficient ex- 
planation of the whole Christian scheme of 
redemption. A father must manifest himself 
to his own children. It is one of the most 
startling thoughts in all the Holy Scriptures 
that God lacks something of completion until 
humanity knows Him as He is. Is the Abso- 
lute not absolute, therefore? The Absolute 
cannot be the Absolute until he is All in All 
to all His children. 

Dr. Eobert E. Speer, in a masterly address 
on ^^Tlie Unsatisfied Longing of Christ," af- 
firms that the divine Saviour cannot be all 
it is possible for Him tp be to any soul until 
He is all it is possible for Him to be to all 
souls. The sea is not the ^^all-absolving sea" 
until it washes all shores, and fills every bay 
and inlet to the utmost of its capacity. The 
air is not the all-ensphering air until it 
penetrates every nook and corner of the 
earth. 

[58] 



A NEW AND LIVING WAY 

From the dawn of moral consciousness in 
man, God has besieged the human soul in ef- 
forts to fill it with His own power and pres- 
ence. Barriers of ignorance have obstructed 
His entrance into our lives, barriers of base 
passion, and false pride, and vain thoughts, 
and selfish desires. God cannot force us to 
recognize and receive Him without robbing 
us of our. free will and power of choice. But 
the sieg^e is never lifted. God never grows 
weary in His attempt to occupy a Kingdom 
which of right is His. The Incarnation is His 
utmost effort to gain access to our inner lives. 
Omnipotence can go no further. The infinite 
has no greater resource of argument or 
power. 

It is as if a father were seeking to reveal 
himself to his children by gifts of his own 
making. Is he an artist? He paints a pic- 
ture, or carves a* statue. That sunset sky is 
our Father's canvas, that human form is his 
sculpture. But not yet do the children see 
their father in his works. So he writes them, 
writes tenderly, simply, beautifully. He re- 

[59] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

veals his mind in* letters. This Bible is our 
Father's letter to us. But not yet do the 
children see their father in his words. At 
last^ having prepared them for his coming, 
he appears among them, walks with them, 
converses with them, helps them in unnum- 
bered ways, and seeks by patience and benev- 
olence to win their love. God was in Christ 
reaonciling the world unto Himself. Can any 
father do more than that? Is there any way 
to God so plain, so simple, so worthy of all 
acceptation, as the Living "Way — the way of 
the Life? More directly than through sym- 
bolism, more satisfyingly than through na- 
ture, more surely than through processes of 
reasoning, more personally than through a 
book, we see God in Jesus Christ. And how 
we see Him is suggested by a poet who found 
and followed the New and Living Way: 

^^In Christ I feel the heart of God 

Throbbing f rora heaven through earth. 
Life stirs again within the clod, 
Renewed in beauteous birth. 
The soul springs up, a flower of prayer, 
Breathing His breath out on the air. 

[60] 



A NEW AND LIVING WAY 



"In Christ I touch the hand of God, 
From His pure heights reached down, 

By blessed ways before untrod, 
To lift us to our crown; 

Victory that only perfect is 

Through loving sacrifice, like His. 

"Holding His hand, my steadied feet 

May walk the air, the seas; 
On life and death His smile falls sweet, 

Lights up all mysteries; 
Stranger nor exile can I be 

In new worlds where He leadeth me." 



[61] 



IV 
NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



THERE is, as Dr. Newton Clarke says, good reason 
why regeneration should be the favorite name for 
describing, from the divine side, the beginning of the 
divine life in man; but if any man, conscious of the 
reality of the change, finds some other figure truer to the 
facts of his own experience, let him not hesitate to use it ; 
the warrant for his freedom is the New Testament itself. 
Even our familiar and comprehensive ^^conversion" is not 
the only legitimate name; perhaps it is not in every case 
the best possible name for the experience it describes. 
Conversion is the turning round of the soul from evil 
to good, from sin to God. But the writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews preferred to speak rather of our being 
^^ "enlightened^' ; so that instead of speaking of a man's 
conversion we might speak with equal accuracy, and in 
some cases perhaps with more perfect fitness, of his 
"illumination,'' the diffusion of divine light through the 
sin-darkened soul. — George Jackson, The Fact of Con- 
version, pp. 104, 105. 

There are experiences of another kind by which the 
faith of a Christian man is verified. Of these one of 
the most decisive and most wonderful is the conscious- 
ness that through Christ he has passed into the eternal 
and divine order. He belongs to two worlds. He is 
just as certain that he is environed by things unseen and 
eternal as that he is en^droned by things seen and tem- 
poral. In the power of the life given to him in the new 
birth he has entered into the Kingdom of God. He is 
conscious that that diviner region is now the native land 
of his soul. It is there that he finds perfect rest and 
perfect freedom. It is a relief to escape to its eternal 



peace and glory from the agitations and vicissitudes, the 
sorrows and successes, of this transitory world. It is 
not always that he is vividly conscious of belonging to 
that eternal order; this supreme blessedness is reserved 
for the great hours of life; but he knows that it lies 
about him always, and that at any moment the great 
apocalypse may come. And even when it is hidden, its 
"powers" continue to act upon him, as the light and heat 
of the sun pass through the clouds by which the burning 
splendor is softened and concealed. — R. W. Dale, The 
Living Christ and the Four Gospels j pp. 15, 16. 



IV 

NEW LIFE FROM GOD 

THERE was a wise and noble man who 
came by night to seek an interview with 
Jesus. He had thought long and deeply on 
religious things. He knew the utter empti- 
ness of a merely mechanical piety. Nothing 
less than a faith of freedom and power could 
satisfy him. So he came to One whom he 
recognized as a religious authority; came by 
night probably because he sought an uninter- 
rupted interview ; proved his courage by com- 
ing at all to One at whom the scribes and 
lawyers looked askance. Jesus honored his 
courage and his sincerity, and gave him the 
best answer possible. 

In that night interview with Nicodemus 
Jesus declared more plainly than at any other 
time His doctrine of the new birth, ^^Ye must 
be bom again. '^ It sounded strange to the 
wise man. It was a dark saying, and a hard 

[67] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

saying. Instantly the scientist and the philos- 
opher asserted themselves in a great, press- 
ing, persistent ^^HowT' Jesns answered the 
question with a parable from nature, a par- 
able about the wind. More mystified than ever 
perhaps, the trnth-seeker went away. But it 
is not written that he went away sorrowful 
or indignant. He went away wondering. 
Subsequently we have a flash-light picture 
of this same Nicodenius. In an hour of crisis 
he speaks a good word for Jesus. The night 
interview was not in vain. "We have no means 
of knowing to what experience in his own life 
Nicodemus had been led by the strange words 
about a second birth, but if we look into 
Christian history we shall find innumerable 
pages made radiant by lives into which had 
come some such transformation as that which 
may properly be supposed to follow a second 
birth. 

Buddhism offers the seeker after the su- 
preme gift of life a second birth, and a third, 
and a thousandth, but all beyond the grave. 
By a series of rebirths, reincarnations, the 

[68] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



soul at last may come to satisfying peace. 
Deliverance from ill may be achieved un- 
comited aeons hence. The doctrine of Jesus 
is that of a present deliverance. He says not 
only, ^^ Ye must be born again/' but, *^ Ye may 
be born again.'' Here and now in the midst 
of time, surrounded by clamorous evils, and 
feeling within our own natures the oft up- 
rising of unspiritual forces, we may, if this 
doctrine of Jesus be dependable, experience a 
change of motive, an acquisition of power, a 
new and superior viewpoint, not by our own 
labored efforts at self-help, but by the com- 
munication of a new and superior quality of 
inward life. 

The word ^^ conversion," with all its wealth 
of meaning, does not adequately describe the 
experience of new life from God. It is diffi- 
cult for us to get away from the etymological 
content of a word, and ^^ conversion" is a 
word which does not necessarily carry with 
it all the significance which attaches to such 
a word as ^^regeneration." Conversion de- 
notes a change from one state or condition to 

[69] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

another, a change of mind, of viewpoint, of 
convictions or emotions. This is included in 
the Christian conception of a spiritual life. 
But the term which describes the genesis of 
this new life is that which Jesus used not 
once, nor twice, but often. After Him, the 
apostles used it. They cannot make it more 
striking by varying the terms by which they 
refer to it. ISTor is there need to make it 
plainer. Birth is the beginning of natural 
life. Eebirth is the beginning of spiritual 
life. 

Conversion is the soul's return to God. It 
has been well called, in instances in which the 
change of attitude was sudden, the soul's leap 
to God. In cases in which the change is more 
gradual, it is the soul^s approach to God. 
Kegeneration is not only a new impulse from 
God, but the genesis of a new heredity, di- 
vine in origin and in essential nature. It is 
the spiritual process of the remaking of a life 
which sin had unmade. 

K youth of twenty sat alone in a little 
hired room in a city boarding house. He had 

[70] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



just left behind him a battle field on which 
sense and spirit had warred for the mastery. 
Sense had been victorious. Conscience was 
at work. The angel of penitence had come 
to minister to him with the sweet baptism of 
tears. The remembrance of other battle 
fields was in his mind. He reasoned with him- 
self thus: ^^My associates have misled me. 
Their combined influence is stronger than my 
power to resist. I must cut loose from them. 
I will.^^ And he did. ^^I have some books 
which have tripped me up. The reading of 
them has awakened the animal within me and 
paralyzed my moral muscle. I will destroy 
them.'^ And he did. ^^I have certain habits 
of thoughts and choice which have been hurt- 
ful to me. By oft yielding to the inclination 
of habit, I have worn grooves in my mental 
mechanism along which it daily becomes 
easier for imagination and desire to run. I 
must establish new mental habits. It will re- 
quire constant and painful effort, but new 
habits can be acquired. But more than all 
these, I have propensities to evil, probably in- 

[71] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

bred. I need not only new friends, and new 
books, and new habits, but a new heredity. 
God is my Father. Surely childship involves 
similitude of character. I will seek to re- 
establish my vital relation to God.'^ What 
he sought was nothing else and nothing less 
than a new birth. How he sought it cannot 
easily be told. Whether he obtained it, he 
alone is competent to say. But one who 
knows him intimately is prepared to affirm 
that presently he became conscious of such a 
new and pervasive sense of inward reen- 
forcement that when he sought in the Scrip- 
tures the proper terminology with which to 
express his experience, he found it only in a 
saying of Paul, ^^If any man be in Christ, he 
is a new creation.'^ 

One who is bom into this world not only 
enters a realm hitherto unknown to him, but 
leaves behind a realm totally different from 
that which he enters. So, it would seem, the 
experience of the new birth involves, prior to, 
or coincident with, the new creation, a de- 
struction, a dismissal, an abandonment of 

[72] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



such ^ ^former things ^^ as are in their nature 
incompatible with the new life upon which 
one has entered. 

If we could divest ourselves of some of our 
po'econceived notions, derived consciously or 
unconsciously from sermons, or books, or 
conversations ; if we could dismiss from our 
minds some of the once valuable but now 
well-worn phrases associated with religious 
experience, and approach the whole problem 
of this experience called regeneration, and 
view it through eyes divested of the scales 
of prejudice through which often we see but 
dimly, because of the very familiarity of that 
uipon which we look, we might see that, after 
all, however naystical the experience may be, 
however supernormal it may seem to be, 
spiritual regeneration has its parallels in the 
realms of intellect and sensibility. Not un- 
common, when we review the mental biog- 
raphies of many people, is the radical, even 
revolutionary, effect of a picture, a book, or 
even of a single sentence, upon all the subse- 
quent history of an individual. Mental life 

[73] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

is reorganized about a new center. The 
esthetic nature is rehabilitated, or moral life 
is penetrated with the imperative force of 
new ideals. An English youth hears by ap- 
parent chance, the phrase, ^^The greatest 
good of the gpeatesit number,'^ and in after 
years confesses that all his studies in civil 
and political economy had their beginning in 
that single sentence. It gripped him as with 
hoops of steel. It brought into play upon 
and within his life, forces of the existence of 
which he had hitherto been unconscious. Ben- 
jamin Franklin ascribed his benevolent im- 
pulses to the influence of a book he read in 
youth — Cotton Mather's ^^ Essays to Do 
Good.'' A young English physician, utterly 
unspiritual, happens into an auditorium in 
which an American evangelist is conducting a 
service. Nothing the evangelist says, noth- 
ing the great choir sings, impresses him, but 
the manner in which the evangelist conducts 
the service, prompt, businesslike, shrewd and 
sane, leads him to review the mental process 
by which he has hitherto evaded the religious 

[74] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



appeal. The young man lias not been irre- 
ligious, but unreligious. He goes away from 
this service to assume henceforth a new at- 
titude, not alone toward religion, but toward 
the world at large. The center of life has 
shifted. Presently we find him a volunteer 
surgeon on a hospital ship among the neg- 
lected fishermen of the North Sea, and a lit- 
tle later, apostle, messenger, and ^^angeF' to 
the Labrador coast. 

Time would fail us were we to attempt even 
to catalogue, without at all describing or de- 
fining, just such experiences, the records of 
which are within the common knowledge of 
us all. Personalities so disparate as Martin 
Luther and Friar Lawrence, Thomas Carlyle 
and John Henry Newman, Professor Franz 
Delitzsch and Mr. W. T. Stead, John "Wesley 
and James Smetham, Horace Bushnell and 
Charles Kingsley, Cardinal Manning and 
Charles H. Spurgeon, Dr. R; W. Dale and 
General Booth, Lady Henry Somerset and 
Adeline, Countess Schimmelmann, Dwight L. 
Moody and Frank T. BuUen, witness, with 

[75] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

that remarkable agreement in general, com- 
bined with difference in detail, which is the 
best evidence of competent testimony, that 
the experience of a new creation is not pecul- 
iar to any period of time or to any type of 
mentality. Professor Eomanes, friend and 
disciple of Darwin, having lost and regained 
his faith in the integrity of the facts of Chris- 
tian consciousness declares, in his ^^ Thoughts 
on Eeligion," ^^This experience [speaking of 
conversion] has been repeated and testified 
to by countless millions of civilized men and 
women in all nations and all degrees of cul- 
ture.'' Professor George Jackson, of Dids- 
bury College/ alluding to many ancient and 
modern instances of spiritual rebirth, says: 

Facts are not fairy armies which vanish into thin 
air at the waving of a magician's wand; but in this 
case the facts are so numerous and so well authenticated 
that to attempt to ignore them is simply to put the fools- 
cap on our own heads. And if, instead of ignoring, 
we will patiently investigate these sudden conversions, 
but two points in regard to them will, I think, become 



^ In the Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt University, 1908, on "The 
Reality of Conversion as a Fact of Consciousneas." 

[76] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



clear to us. First, while no definite significance attaches 
to the manner of conversion but only to the results of 
it, and while sudden conversions are often followed by 
disappointing reactions, on the other hand, the lives of 
multitudes, lifted at once and permanently to a higher 
level, remain to attest the reality of the experience; 
and, secondly, it seems unquestionable, however we may 
explain it, that there are some whose one chance of 
better things lies in some sudden, soul-shattering ex- 
perience, which overturns the life from its foundations. 

In recent years there has been a striking 
movement among scholars, with a passion for 
original investigation and research, to reduce 
the facts of Christian consciousness to a sci- 
ence, or at least to study them with scientific 
thoroughness and impartiality. Professor 
Henry Drummond was among the first to 
point out thai it must be one aim of a scien- 
tific theology to study the phenomena attend- 
ing and following conversion, in order to re- 
store to Christianity its most convincing cre- 
dential. Professor Starbuck in ^'The Psy- 
chology of Religion,^' Professor Coe in ^^The 
Spiritual Life ; Studies in the Science of Ee- 
ligion,'^ and in ^^The Eeligion of a Mature 
Mind,^^ Professor James in ^^ Varieties of 

[77] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

Eeligious Experience," and Professor Jack- 
son in the Cole Lectures alluded to above, 
Tv:liicli have been published under the title 
*^The Fact of Conversion," have done much 
to redeem the data of spiritual life from 
seeming unreality. There can be no satis- 
factory argument against the genuineness of 
the results of conversion in the face of such 
facts as have been collected with extraordi- 
nary care and presented with luminous clear- 
ness by Professor Leuba in the ^^ American 
Journal of Psychology" (vol. 7, page 373), 
by Harold Begbie in ^^ Twice-Born Men" and 
^^ Souls in Action," and by Philip I. Roberts 
in ^^The Dry-Dock of a Thousand Wrecks." 
A distinguished authority on comparative 
religions affirms that the consciousness of 
personal fellowship with God through faith 
in Christ is one of the distinctive features of 
Christianity, and that there is no trace of 
anything like it in any oriental religion. This 
consciousness of fellowship has sometimes 
been called God-consciousness. The moment 
of its beginning is the birth moment of the 

[78] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



new man, the spiritual man. What shall we 
call the event which marks that beginning? 
It has been pointed out that Jesus called it 
rebirth and that Paul called it a new crea- 
tion. Peter speaks of it as a ^^resurrection 
from the dead.^' Dr. Dale accepted ^^ re- 
newal" as the right word to use in de- 
scribing the initial act or process — for it 
would seem that the type of experience varies 
widely between a sudden accession of unac- 
customed life and impulse, and a gradual 
dawning of light and unfolding of power. 
The Shorter Catechi'sm suggests another 
term: ^^ Effectual calling is the work of God's 
Spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin and 
misery, enlightening our minds in the knowl- 
edge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he 
doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus 
Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel." 

A recent biography of Florence Nightin- 
gale by Sir Edward Cook, reviewed at length 
in the ^^ British Weekly" of November 13, 
1913, furnishes* us most interesting facts in 
the spiritual life of that remarkable woman : 

[79] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

Her calling was emphatically the work of God's 
Spirit. It would se'em to most that her early circum- 
stances were supremely fortunate. Her parents were 
very wealthy. . . . They were accustomed to travel on 
the Continent. They were in the very best society, and 
met the leading* men of the day. Florence was an ardent 
student and scholar, winning in her personality, dis- 
tinguished and elegant if not actually beautiful. She 
seems to have been adored by her own circle and ad- 
mired by all who saw her. . . . Her father was a Uni- 
tarian, and though she herself for a time conformed 
outwardly to the Church of England, her opinions did 
not square with any of the ancient creeds. . . . She be- 
came more and more restless, more and more weary. 
The Spirit of God had called her. In an autobiograph- 
ical fragment, written in 1867, she mentions as one 
of the crises of her inner life, that God called her 
to his service on February 7, 1837, and Sir Edward 
tells us that there are later notes still fixing tiiat day 
as the dawn of her true life. She was then seven- 
teen. 

These then are but other terms- to describe 
the workings in men and women of diverse 
types, of a power which is able '^to dissolve 
a life which has all the appearance and prob- 
ability of permanence, and to reorganize it 
by a new principle.'' Professor James, who 
approaches the problems of philosophy and 
inner experience in an attitude of refreshing 

[80] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



candor and who describes them in terms at 
once accurate and nntechnical, thus defines 
conversion: ^'To be converted, to be regen- 
erated, to receive grace, to experience re- 
ligion, to gain assurance, are so many phrases 
which denote the process, gradual or sudden, 
by which a life hitherto divided, and con- 
sciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, be- 
comes unified and consciously right, superior 
and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold 
upon religious realities.'^ Another modern 
thinker, less well known than Professor 
James, but no less hospitable to the truth, 
speak's of religion as ^^the inflow of the di- 
vine into human life, and the consequent up- 
lift of human lif'e to the divine/' This writer 
has, unconscio.usly perhaps, applied to re- 
ligion generally words which best describe the 
beginning of religious life in the human soul. 
A divine hand ^Hhrows open the gates of new 
life'' to us, and something happens in the 
human spirit, which has its symbol in chem- 
istry, when a hitherto chaotic mass begins to 
crystallize, and in biology when a living cell 

[81] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

begins to increase by division and redivision. 
Motion is the* resnltant of power. Life pro- 
ceeds only from life. A dead soul springs 
into life at the tonch of that Power whence 
all spiritual life proceeds. 

Michelangelo's fresco representing the cre- 
ation of man pictures the moment when the 
divine spark is first lighted in human life at 
the touch of the Almighty Hand. Surely it 
requires nothing less than a touch of the 
Creative Hand to restore the soul. Eegener- 
ation is the' restoration of the human spirit 
by the act of Him who first breathed into man 
^^the breath of life.'' Eebirth is the work of 
God 's inbreathing. ' ' The wind bloweth where 
it listeth : ... so is every one that is born of 
the Spirit." 

Sick of sin and weary with failures, we 
long to make a new start, and talk of turning 
over a new leaf. The new start and the fresh 
white leaf are offered us at the moment of our 
re-creation. The lines of Susan Coolidge 
thus become doubly dear to him who stands 
at the portal of a better life : 

[82] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



Every day is a fresh beginning, 
Every morn is the world made new. 

Of all the distinctive ideas of Jesus, per- 
haps the doctrine of new life from God is the 
one most difl&cult for the average man to ac- 
cept. ^^How can a man be born when he is 
old?" As a matter of fact, each added year 
of life after one passes the age of sixteen, 
renders it so much more improbable that he 
will be born agaim This much is certain. 
All the statistics of conversion prove it. 
There is a time in life when the soul is so 
impressionable and the will is so flexible that, 
granted the desire to be born again, the proc- 
ess is not attended with violent emotions. A 
vast majority of all who are consciously led 
by the Spirit enter that consciousness in 
youth. There is a comfortably large number 
of cases of conversion in mature years, and 
even in old age, but the normal age synchro- 
nizes with the first well-developed impulses 
of young manhood and womanhood. Look, 
for a moment, at the words in which a repre- 
sentative company of the twice-born, college 

[83] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

students, eager young thinkers, describe their 
experiences of rebirth i^ 

"The opening of my spiritual eyes was a great event; 
there was no great change otherwise. I had always done 
as well as I knew." 

"The chief change was in my inmost purpose. I was 
no longer self -centered." 

"The change was marked and radical. I had feared 
God, now 1 loved him. I did not rest in ceremonies, 
except as a means of growth." 

"Then God had been far off in the sky, too holy and 
good to let me get close to him. Now he was a tender, 
loving Father, and very near." 

"When rising from my knees, I exclaimed, ^Old things 
have passed away and all things have become new,' it 
was like entering another world — a new state of exist- 
ence." 

"I felt an unfolding of truth and a revelation of God's 
ways. I underwent a moral and intellectual quicken- 
ing." 

These are representative experiences. In 
few cases, apparently, among thoughtful, de- 
cent-living young people is the great change 
accompanied by an emotive upheaval. But 
the expression ^^ change of heart ^^ does not 
begin to exhaust the meaning of the experi- 

2 Edwin Diller Starbuck, "The Psychology of Religion," pp. 119, 
120, 131. 

[84] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



ence, much less does the phrase ^'change of 
mind.'' It is nothing less than a change of 
nature : ' ' The person emerges from a smaller, 
limited world of existence, into a larger world 
of being; the individual learns to transfer 
himself from a center of self -activity into an 
organ of revelation of universal being.'' 
Regeneration is, therefore, the emergence of 
a new self. Individuality is not impaired, 
personality is not dissociated, but by asso- 
ciation with the eternal Self, by alliance with 
Infinite Personality, a spiritual self of which 
before we had been but dimly conscious if at 
all, asserts its sovereignty, and life hence- 
forth can never be the same. 

From the days of Saul of Tarsus until now 
tha doctrine of new life from God has not 
been without exemplification in any age. Cer- 
tain periods seem to be peculiarly rich in il- 
lustrations, as, for instance, the age of the 
Wesleyan revival, and that of the great 
awakening under the preaching of Mr. Moody. 
But that the power of the divine Spirit is not 
exhausted is evident from the current history 

[85] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

of tlie Salvation Anny, and conversions as 
radical and revolutionary as any in "^Tiite- 
field's time are common in every rescue mis- 
sion. If the truth were known it would be 
clear that the same mighty Spirit whose acts 
are written in the New Testament is abroad 
in the world to-day convincing men of sin, 
awakening some who never went into the far 
country and spent their substance riotously, 
to their deep need of spiritual life, and 
through the quiet workings of conscience 
prompting multitudes to seek to be made par- 
takers of the divine nature. The experi- 
ences of the young Japanese, the story of 
whose illumination is strikingly told in a little 
book called ^'The Life BeautifuP^; of Selim, 
son of Hassan Bey, whose quest of the living 
God is related by Henry Otis D wight in ^^A 
Muslim Sir Galahad'^; and of Miss Emily 
Gregory, once associate professor of botany 
at Bryn Mawr, later on the staff of the 
Botanical Department of the University of 
Pennsylvania, and founder of tlie Depart- 
ment of Botany in Barnard College in New 

[86] 



NEW LIFE FROM GOD 



York, the awakening of whose religious na- 
ture is told in ^^A Scientist's Confession of 
Faith," a little book full of rare human in- 
terest — these are as wonderful and as con- 
vincing as anything in all the annals of the 
Church. God still seeks man. Jesus is still 
the Door, and as something of the massive- 
ness and splendor of a house may be judged 
by the greatness of the entrance, so the spa- 
ciousness and beauty of that new life in God 
to which we are called may only be imagined 
by the ampleness and glory of His life 
through Whom we enter into the life of God. 



[87] 



V 

AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 



IT is this entry of the divine into man's sphere, with 
its inversion of the primitive order of things, that 
first gives the elements of the Christian life their full 
depth and force. Only thus can we do equal justice to its 
love and gentleness on one hand, and to its seriousness 
and truth on the other. Christian love means very much 
more than is conveyed in the woefully shallow present- 
ment of it lately indulged in even in popular romances. 
For it is no soft connivance at human weakness and 
error, no embellishing of the events of the world, no 
Yea and Amen to every pronouncement. It is character- 
ized rather by an infinite seriousness, demanding as it 
does, a new world and a new life which only the divine 
Power can bestow. The task that devolves on man is 
not merely man's concern, a private matter of his own 
happiness, but it has a far-reaching effect on the order- 
ing of the Whole, and is thus fraught with grave respon- 
sibility. — Rudolph Euckex, Christianity and the New 
Idealism. Translated by Lucy Judge Gibson, pp. 80, 81. 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

IF man, untouched by religion, be lost; if 
he be spiritually defective; if he be far 
from goodness and from God, or rather, being 
so, he needs two things above all else, an ideal 
and an uplift. 

Many people fail to do right because they 
do not know the right. It is not the function 
of conscience to discern the right. Moral 
judgment must do that ; then conscience bids 
us do what moral judgment pronounces right. 
So conscience has impelled and approved 
many a wrong act; moral judgment may be 
uninstructed or misguided. Conscience needs 
not to be educated, but needs only an indwell- 
ing spirit of righteousness to keep it awake, 
active, sensitive. But moral judgment must 
be educated. We must learn to recognize the 
true and the good when we see them. We 
must be furnished with a correct ideal. 

[93] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

After long discipline the Hebrew people 
acquired a noble ethic. They were incom- 
parably above their neighbors in both the 
theory and practice of virtue. Disraeli was 
entirely justified in reminding a gentleman 
who had taunted him with being a Jew that it 
was no reproach to belong to a race that was 
building marble temples and singing match- 
less songs when the savage races of northern 
Europe were drinking the blood of their ene- 
mies slain in battle. 

Bead the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah and 
judge the moral standing of the Hebrew peo- 
ple: ^^He that walketh righteously, and 
speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the 
gain of oppressions, that shake th his hands 
from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his 
ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his 
eyes from seeing evil; he shall dwell on 
high/' Lofty ideal is that, yet not loftier 
than the picture of God's gentleman pre- 
sented by a psalmist two centuries earlier 
than Isaiah : ^^He that walketh uprightly, and 
worketh righteousness, and speaketh the 

[94] 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

truth in liis heart ... he that sweareth to 
his own hurt, and changeth not . • . shall 
never be moved. '^ 

But if there is lacking in the ethics of the 
Old Testament anything of humility and ten- 
derness, anything of the altruistic outlook, 
the broad view of human brotherhood, and 
social service, we have it in the highest de- 
gree and fullest measure in the life and teach- 
ings of Jesus. There is nothing lacking in 
the system of morals contained in the Chris- 
tian Scriptures. The new ideal is the old, 
perfected, spiritualized, lifted to a purer air 
and a nobler view. It is the testimony of its 
keenest critics that Christianity offers us a 
flawless code. Mr. Herbert Speaicer in the 
preface to his ^^Data of Ethics,^ ^'objects that 
it is too perfect — ^that it mocks and baffles us 
by its very perfection. 

It must be granted, however, that Christi- 
anity is not alone in its advocacy of excellent 
ethics. There is Confucianism — not a re- 
ligion, it may be, but a moral system which 
has taken the place of religion in innumer- 

[95] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

able lives. Let it be conceded that the ethical 
code of Confucius is admirable. But shall 
we not look behind the code at its philosophy? 
What vital force does the Chinese sage rec- 
ognize whereby to make his code effective? 
What motive does he seek to supply his dis- 
ciples ? A single instance will suffice to show 
by what celestial diameters he is separated 
from the Founder of Christianity. Confucius 
teaches the duty of meighborly kindness, but 
shrewdly suggests that the duty is really to 
oneself, inasmuch, as we may be in need some- 
time. An appeal to self-love. Honor your 
parents and your children will honor you. 
How inexpressibly above this is the admoni- 
tion, obey your parents in the Lord : for this 
is right! Even the Mosaic commandment 
lacks this fine spirit, with its judicious re- 
minder of temporal reward, ^^That thy days 
may be long upon the land. ' ' Bead the par- 
able of the Good Samaritan. There is pure 
philanthropy, disinterested benevolence, with 
never a suggestion that we may ourselves fall 
among thieves. 

[ 96 ] 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

There is a unique and significant phrase 
occurring often in the Psalms, ascribing to 
Jehovah the quality of loving-kindness. The 
New Testament encourages us to the cultiva- 
tion of that divine quality, unselfish goodness, 
and affirms the sufficiency of love as the 
ground of obligation. Love is the great word 
in the messages of Jesus, even as it was the 
grfeat force in His ministry. The apostles so 
understood it. ^^We love him, because he 
first loved us." ^^The love of Christ con- 
straineth us." 

President Mark Hopkins, of Williams Col- 
lege, in his great book, ^^The Law of Love 
and Love as a Law," argues the supreme ac- 
cent of Christianity upon love as a motive, 
operating in every possible phase of life, cov- 
ering the whole domain of morals. 

•9r w ^s* w 

Next to a moral ideal, man needs a moral 
uplift, a constant impulse, prompting him to 
approach that standard. There is, in Chris- 
tianity, provision for both these fundamental 
needs. In Jesus, behold the Man! And as 

[97] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

to the motive, the inner energy, the power 
not ourselves which we may make our 
own, whose operation in our lives brings us 
nearer and nearer daily to the mark of our 
high calling, is it not in this — the love of 
Christ? 

This phrase has a threefold meaning: the 
love of Christ for us, our love for Him, and 
His love in us. This it is that constraineth. 
But is not constraint equivalent to coercion? 
Then I will not be coerced ; I am free, and no 
power shall enslave me ! But does it not all 
depend on whether the coercive power be 
from without or from within? If the force 
be external we may resist it, but if it be a 
moral energy within ourselves, we may gladly 
yield. Hunger constrains us to eat, yet we 
do not need to be driven to the breakfast ta- 
ble. Love constrains a mother to minister to 
her children, and she becomes a willing serv- 
ant all her days. Yet is she ever so free as 
when she is serving those she loves? We 
sometimes speak of being in duty bound to 
do such and such things. Duty binds us, 

[98] 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

conscience binds us, gratitude binds us, faith 
binds us, affection binds us, 

"Captive, yet divinely free." 

It is still a debated question what is the 
strongest human motive. Sixty-three years 
ago, the trackless prairies of the West were 
dotted with emigrants^ wagons on their way 
to the coast. It took five months to cover the 
distance from the Mississippi to California, 
but thousands made the journey. Gold was 
there. Neither Alaska snows nor desert suns 
have terror for the modern argonaut. 

Then there is the passion for discovery, the 
desire to explore the unknown. Peary braves 
the hardships of the far white North, Landor 
penetrates the mountain fastnesses of re- 
motest Thibet, and William Edward Geil 
crosses Africa at the equator. 

But what men have not been willing to do 
for treasure, or knowledge, or fame, they 
have been willing to do for love. They have 
gladly eaten the bread of affliction and 
drunken the waters of bitterness all their 

[99] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

days; they have taken the places of others 
in lifelong servitude; they have devoted 
themselves to the object of their affection 
with total effacement of self. 

"As the ancient seer saith — 
Only love is strong as death; 
Aye, and stronger far than life, 
Brave as battle, stout as strife, 
Dearer than the things we see, 
Planted in eternity !'' 

And all that men have been willing to do 
for love, for human love, and more, men have 
done and are doing, constrained by the love 
of Jesns Christ. Father Damien among the 
lepers is a good instance, though not the only 
example by any means. He is type of a very 
large class. The tribute of Robert Louis 
Stevenson was well deserved. Would there 
were some Stevenson to celebrate the heroism 
of many another comrade of the Cross whose 
life has been devoted to the service of those 
whom the rfest of the world forgets, or re- 
members only to pa-ss by on the other side. 
Willis Hotchkiss* goes to a remote district of 

[100] 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

Central AfricU because there is a tribe who 
were as sheep without a shepherd. Mary 
Eeed, an Ohio girl, is among the lepers of 
India. The daughter of one of Americans 
most gifted literary men is devoting herself 
to the care of the inmates of a cancer hospital. 
"What is her inspiration as she breathes the 
fetid air and dresses the festering sores of 
those from whose presence we naturally 
shrink? The love of Christ. 

In the darkest spots of earth ^s darkest con- 
tinents and islands, a host of men and women, 
the sons and daughters of comfort and cul- 
ture, are d'evoting themselves uncalculatingly 
to the uplift of submerged races, healing and 
teaching and preaching in Jesus ^ name. Let 
the world wag its head at missionary senti- 
ment, joining in Sidney Smithes characteriza- 
tion of the whole missionary scheme as the 
dream of a dreamer who dreams he is dream- 
ing, but until the world shows us something 
braver, finer, nobler, more heroic than the 
missionary movement of the modem Church, 
the world would do well to put its finger on 

[101] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

its scornful lips and pray for the grace of 
silence. 

The power of the love of Christ as a mo- 
tive in the lives of his disciples, has it any 
parallel in history?' Let Professor William 
James answer: ^^The best fruits of religious 
experiences are the best things that history 
has to show." Every great life has a great 
motive. Alexander's and Caesar ^s and Na- 
poleon's was the love of conquest. The call 
of the blood in the veins of the warriors is 
to the field of murder set to martial music. 
The passion of Garibaldi was desire for the 
unification and freedom of Italy, to plant 
upon the ruins of old Eome a new and im- 
perial standard. The passion of Garrison 
and Phillips was the love of freedom. It de- 
mands a great motive to call forth from a 
great nature its worthiest deeds. Behold 
what the love of Jesus Christ can do! It 
transforms a narrow zealot like Saul into the 
tireless apostle of a catholic faith, and makes 
him the most influential figure in history this 
side of Calvary. It endows the tongue of 

[102] 



AN EFFICIENT MOTIVE 

Chrysostom with incomparable eloquence, 
and tips the pen of Augustine with resistless 
logic. It anoints Savonarola the prophet and 
saviour of Florence. It lights the torch of 
Luther. It penetrates and possesses the mind 
of Calvin. It energizes the will of Knox and 
warms the heart of "Wesley. It nerves the 
martyrs of modern China when frenzied mobs 
cry, ^^ Death to all Christians !^^ It quickens 
the pulses of six thousand of the choicest of 
our university men and women as they offer 
themselves for service where their Lord most 
needs them. The busy man, already bur- 
dened with affairs, assumes a new office in the 
Church — the love of Christ constraineth him. 
The timid woman who trembles when she 
hears her own voice in public, accepts the 
leadership of a Bible class — the love of 
Christ constraineth her. The young man, 
ambitious to get ahead, turns from the path 
of probable success because he cannot longer 
pursue it and be true to his ethical ideal — 
the love of Christ constraineth him. The 
youth full of the love of life dashes the cup 

[103] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

of pleasure from his lips, denying himself 
daily for the love of Christ. 

If the love of Christ can do so much, shall 
we not carry it — or be carried by it — ^up to 
life 's last conscious hour, and say when earth 
recedes, as the lad in Dickens' story, ^*It is 
time to go to Him who loves me"1! What 
shall separate us from the love of God which 
is in Christ Jesus, our Lord? 

This, then, is the fifth distinctive idea of 
Jesus. He says, ^^I am the way to God,'' and 
He builds His empire in the hearts of men, 
the eternal Lover of souls in a sense in which 
it is true of none other. 



[104] 



VI 

THE UNBROKEN CONTINUITY 
OF LIFE 



HERE the brief in immortality must rest before 
the revelation of the personal life in its full 
power, at its highest and its best in the Son of Man, 
Here reasoning from nature ends, and faith abides, at 
the last ascent of life, where He to whom the Spirit was 
given without measure looked up into the heavenlies and 
knew the Father. We cannot live and die as though the 
sun had not risen, for the light of His spirit now fills 
our skies. Modern science will not think the whole 
process and intent of evolution through, until it shall 
come to the Christ, and behold all that the Jesus of his- 
tory has become and now is in the light of the world. 
There is no full and final answer to our questionings of 
life and death and the whole to come except in the pres- 
ence of the perfect manifestation of life in the Man of 
men, as we behold His glory, even the glory of the Father 
which was from the beginning — the glory that invests 
all lives which are lived in the same mind that was in 
Him. — Newman Smyth, Modern Belief in Immortality, 
pp. 93, 94. 



VI 

THE UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

DISGUISE the term as we may, comfort 
ourselves as we do with symbols and 
parables from nature ^s book, death seems in 
many instances an unrelieved calamity. To 
die in infancy or youth, as many do, before 
life has well begun ; to die in middle age and 
leave one^s work undone; to say good-by to 
a world of beauty and bounty, strikes us as 
nothing else and nothing less than remediless 
disaster. Nothing within the range of pos- 
sible human experience, not even sin, is so 
difficult to reconcile with the doctrine of a 
moral universe as such a death. Sin is the 
defeat of a soul, but out of defeat, out of suc- 
cessive defeats, may come ultimate victory. 
Moral redemption is possible. The hope of 
recovery saves us from despair at sight of the 
destruction wrought by evil. 

£109] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

"Noble souls, through dust and heat 
Rise from disaster and defeat the stronger; 
And, conscious still of the divine 
Within them, lie on earth supine no longer." 

So, over against the word sin we write the 
greater word salvation. This is the bright 
light behind the black clond. But what of 
that other black clond we call death? "What 
light can dispel the shadow it casts across onr 
paths f Is there any thought or truth — ^which 
is the reality back of thought — consideration 
of which renders death other than it seems? 
There is. Christianity gives us a word for 
this reality. Over against the word death, 
Christianity writes the word immortality. 

But here we stand on common ground with 
certain of the other great religions of the 
world. Here, indeed, we find ourselves in 
company with some of the leaders of philo- 
sophic thought who may not be regarded as 
religion founders. 

It cannot be affirmed that the doctrine of 
human immortality is one of the distinctive 
ideas of Jesus. But it can be affirmed, and 

[110] 



UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

is maintained, that in Christianity the truth 
is taught with a unique degree of clearness 
and cogency ; and that the Founder of Chris- 
tianity and those immediate followers of His 
who derived their ideas personally from Him, 
who were the earliest leaders of the Chris- 
tian movement, assert the reality of immor- 
tality with a confidence which lacks nothing 
of certainty. On this subject Jesus spoke 
plainly where others have spoken vaguely, 
and, after him, his apostles leave not doubt- 
ful what others have left doubtful, the af- 
firmation of the survival of personal con- 
sciousness after death. So, Jesus differs 
from other teachers not so much in the idea 
of a future life as in His mental attitude to- 
ward it. He said much of it, but He taught 
more about it by what He did not say. 

As circumstantial evidence may be, and 
often is in every respect as substantial and 
convincing as direct evidence, so the argu- 
ment from silence may be as valid as any 
verbal proof, or process of logic. It is like 
the ^^ argument by withdrawal.'^ For exam- 

[111] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

pie, if you have a theory that a certain stone 
in an archway is an essential part of the 
structure, and if one who has a theory that it 
is not a necessary part removes it, and if at 
once the structure falls or is manifestly in 
danger of falling, or obviously imperfect, you 
need not call witnesses to confirm your the- 
ory. It is confirmed ^^by withdrawal/' In 
law, certain documents are to be construed in 
such and such a way in the absence of any 
provision to the contrary. That is to say, 
certain factors are read into the paper be- 
cause they are, by assumption, already there. 

In the common affairs of daily life and 
communication, we interpret silence of a cer- 
tain kind as equivalent to speech. You have 
a telegram one morning from a friend, say- 
ing, ^^I will arrive at eleven o'clock.'^ In the 
absence of other information you conclude he 
means ^^at eleven o'clock to-day^' — ^not to- 
night, not to-morrow. You reason thus, ' ' Of 
course he means this eleven o 'clock ; if it were 
not so he would have told me.^' 

You left home for business at eight o'clock 

[112] 



UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

in the morning. You met your wife at twelve, 
had luncheon with her and parted at one. 
How do you know the house was not robbed 
an hour after you left tliis morning? How 
do you know the children were well when your 
wife left home ? Yet you never even inquired 
whether burglars had carried away the sil- 
ver or whether the children had come down 
with the measles. You answer, ^^I know that 
all was well for had it not been so she would 
have told me. " What an eloquent interpreter 
of silence you are! 

Your boy went to college in September. 
He had enough money to pay his tuition, buy 
his books and pay his board for three months. 
He seemed entirely willing to go, trusting you 
to send him a remittance for his second term, 
asking for no bond to guarantee his continu- 
ance at college. He knew you expected to 
help him all through his course; if it were 
not so you would have told him. 

Your children had their breakfast this 
morning. They did not manifest any great 
anxiety about where the dinner was to come 

[113] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

from. They expect yon to provide food for 
them. You know where the provisions are, 
and where more may be secured from day to 
day. If it were not so you would have told 
them. Perhaps this may be called the argu- 
ment from silence. 

Now Jesus used this argument in teaching 
His disciples to believe in God. He never rea- 
soned it out with them, but He talked to them 
about God as if God were, and as if He were 
a Father. If it were not so He would have 
told them. They believed in a future life. 
He never took time to reason that out with 
them. But He talked to them as if the future 
life were as certain as the present; as if the 
earth were but one of many dwelling places 
God has prepared for His children. He spoke 
of His plans for the future as if all time were 
His. He talked of centuries and ages as we 
speak of minutes and days. He acted as if 
death were no more than passing into an- 
other room. At last they came to take the 
same view of death. The black specter in 
their path became a mere shadow. The river 

[114] 



UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

dwindled into a mere brooklet to be crossed 
with a single step. He let them hold that view 
of death. We believe it was the true one. If 
it were not so He would have told them. 

The affirmation of immortality was not a 
novelty. Socrates and Plato had affirmed it. 
But they had to argue it, and right well they 
did so. The attitude of Jesus was that of 
calm confidence in the unbroken continuity of 
life. In this He is unique. He had no need 
to reason out a truth. He possessed truth as 
an attribute, not as an act. 

Our confidence in immortality cannot pos- 
sibly be founded as that of Jesus was. He 
saw the whole circle of life, whereas we see 
but a little segment, a broken arc. Like 
Plato, and like Paul, we must reason out our 
faith. But our confidence may be kindled by 
His confidence. He was One who never 
doubted; One, who knowing what a great 
tyrant death is, calmly looked on death as if 
it were but an incident in life, an incident 
like sorrow, to be faced courageously, but not 
feared; an incident like pain, to be borne 

[115] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

patiently; like doubt, to be dispelled; like 
sickness, to be cured; like darkness, to be 
passed through. 

If you have ever been at sea in a storm you 
know how all eyes watch the captain. If he 
is calm, so are the passengers. If he looks 
troubled, they are troubled. Look at Jesus 
when the shadows of death were gathering 
around Him. His friends were few. His ene- 
mies were many and strong. His ministry 
had been brief. Yet with the Cross in sight, 
He speaks as serenely as any king on his way 
to coronation. He speaks of His Kingdom, 
of his conquest, of conquests yet to be. If 
He could so speak on the eve of His death, 
surely we may fare on, all unperturbed by 
thoughts of the narrow bed under the green, 
^^ hoping, and assuredly believing'^ as Shaks- 
pere wrote in his last will and testament, ' ' to 
be made partaker of life everlasting." 

When did Jesus ever do or say anything 
that may be interpreted as teaching that death 
is the end of life? The little daughter of 
Jairus was dead to all her friends, but she 

[116] 



UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

was not dead to Him. She was asleep, and 
He had but to awaken her. The son of the 
widow of Nain was dead to his mother, but 
in Jesus ' view he had simply passed into an- 
other room, and had but to be recalled. There 
is Another Room. Lazarus had entered that 
room and returned at Jesus ' call — still Laza- 
rus. So there is nothing in the Other Room 
to destroy or impair personality. The line 
of life is undeflected. If it were not so He 
would have told us. 

I stood on the banks of the Potomac one 
morning in March. The river was cold, and 
the air was warm, and the mist rose from the 
river and concealed the tops of the tallest 
buildings. I looked at the Washington Monu- 
ment. It seemed to end about two hundred 
feet above tbe ground. If I had not seen it 
before in its completion, I might have judged 
two hundred feet to be the height of the shaft, 
but I knew it was higher than that. Indeed 
I had ascended it and it took but a moment 
of time for imagination to reconstruct the in- 
visible part of the monolith. It was an un- 

[117] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

broken shaft, even though the larger part of 
it was invisible. Such was Jesus' view of 
life. The mists of death never obscured its 
unbroken continuity. 

If His view of life be the correct one, then 
death is but a mist, a cloud, and they who 
pass out of our sight pass through the cloud 
as our soldiers did who led the Union line far 
up the slopes of Lookout Mountain. They 
planted their banner above the clouds. To 
them the clouds were no barriers. To us who 
follow Jesus, death is no barrier. He planted 
His victorious banner above the clouds, on an 
immortal height, to which He calls us as He 
bids us follow Him. 

Perhaps the force of this argument for im- 
mortality will appeal to us all the more pow- 
erfully when we remember that Jesus was an 
absolutely candid teacher of the truth. He 
assumed to lead His people into all essential 
truth. So He was under every obligation to 
disabuse the minds of His disciples of errors 
into which they had been led by others. This 
is exactly what He did. He was constantly 

[118] 



UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF LIFE 

correcting their conceptions of things reli- 
gions. They believed in the fntnre life. He 
never rebnked them for it. He never warned 
them that they were cherishing a false hope. 
He had been crnel beyond belief to call them 
to martyrdom in the belief that the moment 
of their death was to be the moment of their 
victory, if He had not Himself shared their 
undying hope. They may have had their mo- 
ments of donbt and wavering. He never had. 
They hoped. He knew. He was conscious of 
supreme superiority to every limitation of 
time. To Him time was one eternal present, 
and life one uninterrupted line. 

Death is the result of organic change. The 
spirit is not organic. What, then, can death 
do f It can release the spirit. That is all. 

"Never the spirit was born; 
The spirit will cease to be never; 
Never was time it was not; 
End and beginning are dreams; 
Birthless and hopeless and changeless 
Remaineth the spirit forever; 
Death hath not touched it at all, 
Dead though the house of it seems." 

[119] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

You may take a berth on a southbound 
train in the midst of a snowstorm. The last 
sounds you hear will be the furious wind and 
the dashing sleet. In the morning you will 
awaken in a land of soft breezes and blue 
skies. In another day you will see the orange 
trees in bloom and hear the mocking birds 
make melody in the silvery dawn. 

It is a parable of life and death. There is 
an old prayer beginning, ' ' Thou who callest 
Thy people to pass through death that they 
may see Thy face.^' Jesus confirms the 
longing and vindicates the hope which others 
have laboriously striven to prove probable. 
And unless we are greatly deceived He did 
^^pass through death/' He did emerge un- 
hurt, and lives until this day in the Heaven 
of heavens, and in that Kingdom He has set 
up in pure and humble hearts. 



[120] 



vn 

THE DISTINCTIVE PERSONALITY 
OF JESUS 



THAT by which the divinity of Jesus is seen to be 
not a mere logical addendum to Christianity but 
an integral part of Christianity itself is simply these 
meanings of the fact of Christ which we have been dis- 
cussing. What the Christian man finds he receives from 
Jesus is not simply teaching about God, but is a life 
and power that are of God himself. He finds in the 
fact of Christ all he looks to find in God. As he reads 
the definition of eternal life as to "know thee (that is 
God) . • . and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent," he is 
quite unable religiously to maintain the distinction be- 
tween the two. He finds God not beyond Christ, but in 
Him. In the very human life and person of Jesus we 
find not only a human life and person that direct us to 
a higher source of power; we find already there the 
presence and power of what declares itself to be not 
less than God Himself. When Jesus deals with us and 
works within us. He does what only God can do. All 
Christian experience is nothing if it is not this. And 
if this be so, then, again, we can only in one way say 
what Jesus is. As Herrmann aptly puts it, "when we 
confess His deity, we simply give Him His right name." 
What other name can we give to One who is for us and 
in us what assuredly only God can be"? — P. Carnegie 
Simpson, The Fact of Christ, pp. 130, 131. 



VII 

THE DISTINCTIVE PERSONALITY 
OF JESUS 

IT is on record that certain officers were 
sent to arrest Jesus and bring Him before 
a committee to be examined as to the pur- 
pose of His teachings and their possible ef- 
fect upon the people. The officers saw Jesus 
and heard Him, but returned without their 
Prisoner. ^'Why have ye not brought him?^^ 
they were asked. Their reply was, ^^ Never 
man spake like this man.^^ This, in effect, 
is the unconscious testimony of all who came 
close to Jesus — close enough to hear Him 
in parable or invitation or warning or 
promise. 

We have studied the great ideas of Jesus 
which have no adequate parallel in any other 
of the religions of the world that offer them- 
selves in opposition to Christianity or in com- 
petition with it. Now, considering His mes- 

[125] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

sage as a whole, these qualities distinguish 
it from the teachings of other sages and 
philosophers : its transparent simplicity ; its 
self-assertive authority; its absolute cer- 
tainty, that is, the absence from it of any 
^^ ventured assertion,'' and its wholesome 
sanity. 

The best literature suffers, necessarily, 
from translation into foreign tongues, how- 
ever flexible or copious those tongues may be. 
But turned into whatsoever mold of lan- 
guage they may be, the teachings of Jesus are 
so plain that any man of ordinary under- 
standing, however untutored his mind may 
be, need not err therein. The recorded words 
of Jesus are few, but they are like a gushing 
fountaiQ in the heart of the hills, in whose 
pure and unexhausted depths countless rivers 
have their source. Moreover, Jesus assumed 
an authority which differenced Him from all 
the mere prophets who had preceded Him and 
all the mere apostles who succeeded Him. 
They quoted the opinions of the ancients, and 
stood upon precedents. Jesus prefaced his 

[126] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

great sayings with, ^'Ye have heard that it 
hath been said, . . . but I say unto you.'' 
He created precedents. Then the positiveness 
of His affirmations is refreshing. His preface 
often was, ^'Verily, verily,'' a Hebraism of 
superlative assurance. Nothing that Jesus 
said has become obsolete in the light of sub- 
sequent knowledge. Professor Romanes thus 
puts it in ^^ Thoughts on Eeligion": 

One of the strongest pieces of objective evidence in 
favor of Christianity is not sufficiently enforced by 
apologists. Indeed I am not aware that I have ever 
seen it mentioned. It is the absence from the biography 
of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth 
of human knowledge — ^whether in natural science, ethics, 
political economy, or elsewhere — ^has had to discount. 
This negative argument is really almost as strong as is 
the positive one from what Christ did teach. For when 
we consider what a large number of sayings are recorded 
of — or at least attributed to — ^Him, it becomes most re- 
markable that in literal truth there is no reason why any 
of His words should ever pass away in the sense of be- 
coming obsolete. . . . Contrast Jesus Christ in this re- 
spect with other thinkers of like antiquity. Even Plato, 
who, though some four hundred years before Christ in 
point of time, was greatly in advance of Him in respect 
of philosophic thought, is nowhere in this respect as 
compared with Christ. Read the Dialogues, and see how 
enormous is the contrast with the Gospels in respect of 

[127] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

errors of all kinds, reaching even to absurdity in re- 
spect of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral 
sense. Yet this is confessedly the highest level of human 
reason on the lines of spirituality when unaided by 
alleged revelation. 

WMle the personality of Jesus is not nec- 
essarily included in a discussion of His teach- 
ings, nevertheless we may very appropriately 
follow a survey of His doctrines with a study 
of His character. On the eve of His triumphal 
entry into Jerusalem the whole city was 
stirred and one question sprang from every 
mind to every tongue, ^^Who is thisT' This 
has been the inquiry of the ages. There is 
no more pressing problem of to-day. No one 
can read the New Testament without con- 
fronting it. Indeed, no one can review the 
history of what we call Christian civilization 
without feeling called upon to come to some 
kind of opinion about Him. 

Much less can one acquaint himself with 
Christian biography without meeting the 
query, ^^Who is this?^' Can one read the life 
of Gladstone, even as written by so pro- 
nounced an agnostic as Viscount Morley, 

[128] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

without being conscious of another Person- 
ality to whom the great commoner was so re- 
lated that we cannot estimate the life of the 
statesman without reference to that Other 
whose disciple he professed to be? In the 
portico of Trinity Church, Boston, they have 
set up a statue of Phillips Brooks, by St. 
Gaudens. Just back of the heroic figure of 
the great preacher stands another figure, in 
whose face we recognize the features of the 
Christ of art. It is impossible to account for 
Phillips Brooks, for the sanity and sanctity 
of his life and the pervasiveness and perma- 
nence of his influence, without reference to 
that Other. ^^Who is this?'^ 

Not only does the question confront us, 
^^Who is thisT^ but it is speedily followed 
by a peremptory challenge, ^^What shall I do 
then with Jesus which is called Christ?'' We 
may read the biographies of great men with 
the keenest interest but without feeling called 
upon to do anything. The biographies of 
Bismarck and Cavour do not demand any act 
of the will on the part of the reader. The 

[129] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

strange thing about the Gospels, the inex- 
plicable thing — unless we admit the super- 
natural character of the central Person of the 
books — ^is that they demand a verdict. The 
personality of Jesus presents a moral im- 
perative, ^^What will ye do with Me?" So, 
the fact of Christ lies not alone in the realm 
of history, but of morals. 

Eeason rejects the notion that four men, 
not of the learned class, dwellers in a Eoman 
dependency, remote from the literary influ- 
ences which dominated the age, held it within 
either their purpose or their power to invent 
such a character as Jesus. Had the evangel- 
ists been dramatists, creators of romance, and 
had they been capable mentally and morally 
of imagining such a personality as Jesus, they 
would not have offered Him to the world as 
the Messiah. He was altogether unlike the 
Man the Jews expected ; totally dissimilar to 
the deliverer the Gentile world had set its 
hopes upon. Isaiah's Wonderful-Counsellor 
and Virgil 's heaven-born world ruler are not 
unlike, 

[130] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

Jesus was bom of a Jewish mother. His 
human lineage and His environment, the in- 
tellectual, social and religious atmosphere of 
His childhood and youth, all conspired to 
make Him a typical Jew of the Augustan age. 
But something defeated that conspiracy. 
There is nothing in Bethlehem, Nazareth or 
Jerusalem to account for the fact that He was 
not a typical Jew of his age, or of any other 
age. Tolerant, catholic, cosmopolitan, uni- 
versal, He towers above his contemporaries 
as would a giant sequoia, springing out of 
the arid soil of a sagebrush plain. 

Considered as to the magnitude of His 
plans, which included the conquest of the 
world; as to the method by which He pro- 
posed to conquer all nations, not by the arm 
of power, but by spiritual agencies; consid- 
ered as to the union in Him of moral faculties 
generally regarded as absolutely antagonistic, 
such as justice and benevolence, power and 
tenderness, Mngly dignity and meek humility, 
stainless purity and abounding sympathy for 
the slaves of sin, eagerness for the coming 

[131] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

of the Kingdom of God and passionate pa- 
tience to await the widening thoughts of men 
— considered as to these, the character of 
Jesus is as unique as are His ideas. ^^ Ideas 
alone/ ^ says Griffith Thomas, ^^ never save 
and inspire lives; they must have a per- 
sonality behind them to give them reality, 
vitality and dynamic. A disciple is more than 
a scholar, an inspiration is more than instruc- 
tion. Christ's words are of permanent value 
because of His person; they endure because 
He endures. '^ 

Considered as to the claims He made for 
Himself, Jesus stands alone, majestic and in- 
comparable. He claimed to be the Messiah, 
but in this He was not alone. There have 
been many false Messiahs. What is more. He 
claimed to be the Eedeemer of all sinners, the 
Master of all good servants, the Judge of all 
mankind. He suffered Himself to be called 
by many various titles, Eabbi, Master, Lord, 
but the name He most frequently applied to 
Himself was Son of Man. As the son of 
Mary He belonged and still belongs to the 

[132] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

Jews. But as the Son of Man He belonged, 
and belongs forever, to humanity. 

"0 man^s best man, love's best love, 
perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest." 

It was given to no other great religious 
teacher to foresee the extent of the influence 
of his own faith. Buddha never dreamed of 
being the object of the adoration of millions. 
Mohammed never hoped to extend his con- 
quests beyond the desert peoples. But Jesus 
was serenely confident during His life, and 
even in the presence of death, that He was 
founder of a Kingdom which should include 
all other kingdoms. ^^The deliberateness of 
destiny'^ was in His steps. The assurance of 
eternity was in His promises. Superiority to 
time and space, to natural and artificial bar- 
riers, to national and international boun- 
daries, to principalities and powers, to things 
present and things to come, was in His soul 
who said, ^^I . . . will draw all men unto 
me'^; ^^AU power is given unto me in heaven 

[133] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 



and in earth. ... I am with you alway, 
even unto the end of the world. ^^ The 
amazing progress of the Gospel in mod- 
em times is thus revealed as no surprise 
to Him. He predicted it from the begin- 
ning. 

In a sense in which it is not true of any 
other religion it is true of Christianity that 
its Founder is still a vital and vitalizing per- 
sonality among men. Jesus lives not alone 
in history and in the institutions which have 
flourished where the influence of Christianity 
prevails, but in the consciousness of multi- 
tudes to whom His name is not merely that of 
a hero and a martyr but the name of a fa- 
miliar friend. If it is true, as Froude says, 
that no man in modern times is what he 
would have been if Luther had not lived, it 
is true in a larger measure that nothing in 
modem civilization has been untouched by the 
spirit of Jesus. Laws and customs have been 
modified, the accepted code of ethics has been 
shaped, benevolence and philanthropy have 
been inspired, the passion for popular edu- 

[134] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

cation and popular government has been 
nourished, standards of personal and family 
life have been raised, by the presence in the 
world of a power whose source is in no other 
than in Him Who said, ^'My words shall not 
pass away.'^ ^^ Where the word of a king 
is, there is power. ' ' But there is among men 
a kind of power which cannot be spoken of in 
general terms, a power such as that the 
laureate had in mind in his immortal tribute 
to Arthur Hallam: 

And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone/' 

It is a restraining power when human na- 
ture needs restraint, when imperious and 
clamorous passions would carry us away 
from sanity and holiness; a constraining 
power when human nature needs to be roused 
from its moral lethargy. This power Paul 
knew who said, ^^The love of Christ con- 
straineth us.^^ Did he mean our love for 
Christ, or Christ's love for usi Great as is 

[ 135 ] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

the place these thoughts held in PauPs mind, 
he had quite another thought in view — the 
love of Christ in us. 

The benefactors of the race in former 
periods of time — 

"Bards, prophets, martyrs, sages, 
The noble of all ages. 
Whose deeds fill history's pages, 
And Time's great volume make," 



these we venerate. Hardly can it be said of 
any one of us, even the most sentimental, that 
he loves Socrates or St. Francis. But it is 
said, with every evidence of sincerity, by mul- 
titudes of people, of every degree of intelli- 
gence, and of every type of temperament, that 
they love Jesus. They sang His love in their 
secret meetings in the Catacombs. The 
words, ^^Jesu amor mens,'* which inspired 
the hymn below, go back to the age of the 
martyrs of Nero ^s Eome : 

"In this dreary dungeon, I, 
Bound in chains a prisoner, lie, 
But my Love is ever nigh — 
^Jesus is my Love.' 

[136] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

"Friends and kindred all have fled, 
Some are false and others dead, 
But this One of whom I said, 
^Jesus is my Love.' 

"Better with Him in the gloom 
Of this dreary dungeon tomb. 
Than without in palace room — 
^Jesus is my Love.' 

"Scant my clothing, coarse my food, 
Vexed am I with treatment rude. 
Yet, though lacking earthly good, 
^Jesus is my Love.' 

et .r here in bonds to lie. 
Better on the block to die. 
Than my faith I should deny — 
^Jesus is my Love.' " 

What is tlie secret of this persistent idea 
that Jesus is still alive, to receive our decla- 
rations of love and, in return, to manifest His 
love to us? It is in an experience of fellow- 
ship, the ground of which is in the realm of 
consciousness, a realm which lies far beyond 
the reach of scientific or historical criticism. 

Jesus promised to be with His disciples in 
all ages. The Christian Church affirms that 

[137] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

this promise has been verified. Is the claim 
of Christianity in this respect verifiable? 
Not by logic. (It is John Morley who says, 
^^Mere logic as a finder of truth is only a thin 
sour wine, and not an acid.") Not by mere 
ratiocination. But it may be verified in a 
truly scientific way, by personal experiment. 
Many of the sayings of Jesus are axiomatic. 
They are self-evidencing to the heart, as light 
is self-evidencing to the eye, or as sound to 
the ear. Many other sayings of Jesus are 
demonstrable. Some of His sayings are 
neither axiomatic nor provable, but rather of 
the nature of revelation. They are mysteries 
which only the great hereafter may explain. 
But certain sayings of Jesus, few in number 
yet memorable and unique, are purely experi- 
ential. They are such as : " My peace I give 
unto you." ^^Come unto me . . . and I will 
give you rest. " '' He that hath my command- 
ments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth 
me : and he that loveth me shall be loved of 
my Father, and I will love him, and will mani- 
fest myself to him." 

[138] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

If the volume of testimony alluded to in 
a preceding chapter concerning the experi- 
ence of new birth be weighty and impressive, 
equally so is the testimony of the ages to the 
truth that Jesus lives in the consciousness 
of those who call him Lord. The late Hugh 
Price Hughes, in an address on ^^The Un- 
answerable Argument for Christianity/^ once 
referred to three distinguished Englishmen 
of his day, Michael Faraday, Robert Brown- 
ing and John Bright, as convincing witnesses 
to the truth of the presence of Christ in hu- 
man consciousness. But his argument was 
the more cogent, because he concluded with 
these words: ^'Let me also, in all humility^ 
bear my personal testimony. The experience 
of which I speak is my own experience. For 
thirty years I have lived in the light of that 
great revelation of God^s love, which was 
given to me when I was a schoolboy in 
Wales. ^^ Very like John Bunyan^s declara- 
tion : ^^I have ventured my own soul upon this 
truth, and were all your souls mine own, as 
my own soul is, I would venture them there.'' 

[139] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

The marvel of all this is not so much that 
large numbers of people in every age for nine- 
teen centuries should cherish such thoughts, 
express such sentiments, indulge such emo- 
tions, tenaciously cling to such convictions; 
the wonder is that He who is the object of 
this affection should have foreseen it, pre- 
dicted it, built all his plans upon its certain 
fulfillment. The Kingdom Jesus spoke of as 
His Kingdom lay, and still lies, primarily 
within the hearts of men. It is an empire of 
love. There have been other religions with 
millions of adherents. But the distinctive 
fact in His religion is ^'the continuous and 
ubiquitous activity of His person. Under all 
its forms, in all its periods, and through all 
its divisions, the one principle alike of reality 
and unity has been and is devotion to Him. 
He is the Spirit that inhabits all the churches, 
the Law that rules the conscience and binds 
into awed and obedient reverence the saintly 
men who live within all the communions that 
bear His name.'^ 

What is the conclusion of the whole mat- 

[140] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

ter? Who is this? What think ye of Him? 
What then shall we do with Him? '^If it is 
not STiperhnman authority that speaks to ns 
here, it is surely superhuman arrogance. . . . 
One man of a particular race and age cannot 
be the standard for all men,- the judge of all 
men, of all ages and races, the goal of human 
moral development, unless he is something 
more than one man among many/' If He be 
that Something More, what else can He be 
than what the Church unites to call Him, ^ ' the 
Word of God Incarnate ' ' ? And if He be that, 
then all the mystery is clear, the mystery of 
His perpetual power and of the world's in- 
creasing interest in Him. God has spoken. 
^* Infinite silence breaks into the spray of hu- 
man speech upon these earthly shores. ^^ If 
He be that, we know both how human is the 
heart of God, and how divine may be the life 
of man. Nay, rather being that, the riddle 
of the universe is solved and now we know 
that in the labyrinth of life there dwells no 
monster to devour, but, at the beginning and 
end of every process of human development, 

[141] 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 

individual and social, is One whose purpose is 
to make us perfect in Him. 

The words with which these studies close 
are written as we enter the Advent season. 
The stars that shower their silver on the earth 
to-night bear us in memory back to Bethle- 
hem. The bells across the snow, the trees 
that blossom in our homes with joy for little 
children's eyes, the gracious greetings sent 
from friend to friend, are all symbolic of the 
gifts he brought, and of that gift supreme, 
Himself. We know that He was helpless 
Babe, and reverent Child ; that He was Youth 
obedient to the yoke of discipline and toil; 
that He was perfect Man and that there dwelt 
in Him ^^the fulness of the Godhead bodily"; 
that He who came from God returned to God, 
our Elder Brother still, and that He ever lives 
on high. Not for us now are opened heavens 
and angels' song, but is it nothing that we 
have His peace. His love of peace. His faith 
in things unseen, His interest in all mankind, 
His sympathy for those who suffer and His 
pity for the weak?' 

[142] 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

Alice Meyneirs tribute to Jesus in her 
poem called ^^ Christ in the Universe'^ is such 
as is deserved by none other than the Lord of 
all worlds. 

With the ambiguous earth 
His dealings have been told us; these abide; 
The signal to a maid, the human birth, 
The lesson, and the Young Man crucified. 

But not a star of all 
The unimaginable stars has heard 
How He administered this terrestrial ball; 
Our race have kept their Lord's entrusted word. 

Of those earth-visiting feet 
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous — 
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet 
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us. 

No planet knows that this 
Our planet, carrying land and wave, 
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss, 
Bears as chief treasure one forsaken grave. 

Nor in our little day 
May His de\dces with the heavens be guessed, 
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way, 
Or His bestowals there be manifest. 

But in the eternities 
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear 
A million alien gospels, in what guise 
He walked the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear. 

[143 1 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 



0, be prepared, my soul! 
To read the inconceivable, to scan 
The million forms of God those stars unroll 
When in our turn we show to them — a Man. 



[ 144 ] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alexander, William, Primary Convictions. 

Barrows, John H., Christianity the World Religion. 

Begbie, Harold, Twice-Born Men. 

Begbie, Harold, Souls in Action. 

Brooks, Phillips, The Influence of Jesus. 

Bushxell, Horace, The Character of Christ. 

CoE, George A., The Spiritual Life. 

Coe, George A., The Religion of a Mature Mind. 

Dale, R. W., The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. 

Dale, R. W., Fellowship with Christ. 

Drummoxd, Henry, The Ideal Life. 

Edersheim, Alfred, The Life and Times of Jesus the 

Messiah. 
Fairbairn, a. M., The Place of Christ in Modern 

Theology. 
Falconer, R. A., The Truth of the Apostolic Gospel. 
Forsyth, P. T., The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. 
Gordon, G. A., The Christ of To-Day. 
HiLLis, N. D., The Influence of Christ in Modern Life. 
HORTON, R. F., My Belief. 
Hughes, Hugh Price, Essential Christianity. 
Hughes^ Hugh Price, Social Christianity. 
Jackson, George, The Fact of Conversion. 
James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience. 
King, H. C, The Ethics of Jesus. 
Mathews, Shailer, The Gospel and the Modem Man. 
NicOLL, W. Robertson, The Church's One Foundation. 
Pierson, a. T., Many Infallible Proofs. 



THE DISTINCTIVE IDEAS OF JESUS 



Rhees, Rush, The Life of Jesus of Nazareth. 
Roberts, Philip I., The Dry-Dock of a Thousand 

Wrecks. 
Romanes, G. J., Thoughts on Religion. 
Ross, G. A. J., Tlie Universality of Jesus. 
Simpson, P. Carnegie, The Fact of Christ. 
Simpson, P. Carnegie, The Facts of Life. 
Smith, David, The Days of His Flesh. 
Smith, David, The Historic Jesus. 
Speer, Robert, The Man Christ Jesus. 
Speer, Robert, The Character of Christ. 
Stalker, James, The Christology of Jesus. 
Starbuck, G. D., The Psychology of Religion. 
Thomas, W. H. G., Christianity Is Christ. 
Van Dyke, Henry, The Gospel for a World of Sin. 
Van Dyke, Henry, The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. 



[ 148 J 



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